Polish American History after 1939

2024-06-03
Polish American History after 1939
Author: Joanna Wojdon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2024-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040031056
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This book is the second in a three-part, multi-authored study of Polish American history which aims to present the history of Polish Americans in the United States from the beginning of Polish presence on the continent to the current times, shown against a broad historical background of developments in Poland, the United States and other locations of the Polish Diaspora. According to the 2010 US Census, there are 9.5 million persons who identify themselves as Polish Americans in the United States, making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the country today. Polish Americans, or Polonia for short, has always been one of the largest immigrant and ethnic groups and the largest Slavic group in America. Despite that, common knowledge about its social and political life, culture and economy is still inadequate – in Academia and among the Polish Americans themselves. The book discusses the major themes in Polish American history, such as organizational life and the structure of the community facing subsequent waves of immigration from Poland, its leadership and political involvement in Polish and American affairs, as well as living and working conditions, and the everyday life of families and communities, their culture, ethnic identity and relations with the broadly understood American society, starting from the outbreak of World War 2 in Poland in September, 1939, and ending with the highlights of the 21st-century developments. It depicts Polish Americans’ transition from a ‘minority’ through ‘ethnic’ group to Americans who take pride in their symbolic ethnicity, maintained intentionally and manifested occasionally. This volume will be of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Polish and American History and Social and Cultural History.

Traitors and True Poles

2003-04-15
Traitors and True Poles
Author: Karen Majewski
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2003-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821441116
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During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland’s reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it. By introducing these varied and forgotten works into the scholarly discussion, Traitors and True Poles recasts the literary landscape to include the immigrant community’s own competing visions of itself. The conversation between Polonia’s creative voices illustrates how immigrants manipulated often difficult economic, social, and political realities to provide a place for and a sense of themselves. What emerges is a fuller picture of American literature, one vital to the creation of an ethnic consciousness. This is the first extended look at Polish-language fiction written by turn-of-the-century immigrants, a forgotten body of American ethnic literature. Addressing a blind spot in our understanding of immigrant and ethnic identity and culture, Traitors and True Poles challenges perceptions of a silent and passive Polish immigration by giving back its literary voice.

Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945

2010-01-08
Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945
Author: M.B.B. Biskupski
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2010-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813173523
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During World War II, Hollywood studios supported the war effort by making patriotic movies designed to raise the nation's morale. They often portrayed the combatants in very simple terms: Americans and their allies were heroes, and everyone else was a villain. Norway, France, Czechoslovakia, and England were all good because they had been invaded or victimized by Nazi Germany. Poland, however, was represented in a negative light in numerous movies. In Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945, M. B. B. Biskupski draws on a close study of prewar and wartime films such as To Be or Not to Be (1942), In Our Time (1944), and None Shall Escape (1944). He researched memoirs, letters, diaries, and memoranda written by screenwriters, directors, studio heads, and actors to explore the negative portrayal of Poland during World War II. Biskupski also examines the political climate that influenced Hollywood films.

The Exile Mission

2004
The Exile Mission
Author: Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2004
Genre: Polish Americans
ISBN: 0821415263
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Considering the two distinct Polish immigrant groups after World War II - the Polish-American descendants of pre-war ecomomic migrants and polish refugees fleeing communism - this study explores the uneasy challenge to reconcile concepts of responsibility toward their homeland.

Poland 1939

2020-07-14
Poland 1939
Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2020-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465095410
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A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.

The Townsend Family in the Emerging American West, 1856-1926

2024-11-18
The Townsend Family in the Emerging American West, 1856-1926
Author: Susan E. James
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040253644
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This book examines the life of the Townsend family and the events that occurred during the period of 1856–1926 that shaped an expanding American West. Bryant and Julia (Riley) Townsend and their three children were born into an age of rapid change and competing cultures. Witnesses to a century of events that shaped a nation, their lives define the complexities and challenges of incomers who arrived in an expanding American West. From the Gold Rush to the California oil boom, from slavery to female suffrage, from Indian Wars to World Wars, the Townsends lived through violent upheavals, outlasting cities, societal beliefs and entire ways of life. Married in a mining camp in Nevada and relocating frequently, the couple embraced the momentary riches, shattering losses and personal disasters faced by a vast number of immigrants, foreign and domestic, striving to survive in an often-hostile landscape. Their lives and those of their three children, Minnie Edith, Bryant and Persia, form the architecture supporting an examination of multiple facets of the Western experience and are exemplars of the different populations that merged to form the American identity. This volume will be of value to students and scholars interested in American history, social and cultural history and modern history.

African Americans and the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970

2024-07-22
African Americans and the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970
Author: James A. Farquharson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040098576
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This book is the first to recover and analyse at length the extent, complexity, and character of African American responses to the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Far from having only marginal significance, the Nigerian Civil War collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. Black civil rights leaders offered their service as agents of direct diplomacy during the conflict, seeking to preserve Nigerian unity; grassroots activists organised food-drives, concerts, and awareness campaigns in support of humanitarian aid for victims of famine in the warzone; while other black activists warned of an imminent genocide and called for an united response from black Americans. Drawing on private papers, activist literature, government records, and especially the black press, it charts the way the civil war shaped, as well as challenged, the worldview of African Americans regarding black internationalist solidarities, territorial sovereignty and political viability, humanitarian compassion, and the political trajectory of postcolonial Africa. With a chronological approach, this study is the ideal resource for all those interested in the Nigerian Civil War and the history of black internationalism.

The Eagle Unbowed

2012-11-27
The Eagle Unbowed
Author: Halik Kochanski
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 911
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674071050
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The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.

Spring Will Be Ours

2010-11-01
Spring Will Be Ours
Author: Andrzej Paczkowski
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780271047539
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The Spring Will Be Ours focuses on the turbulent half century from the outbreak of World War II in 1939, which started the chain of events that would lead to the communist takeover of Poland, to 1989, when futile attempts to reform the communist system gave way to its total transformation. Andrzej Paczkowski shows how the communists captured and consolidated power, describes their use of terror and propaganda, and illuminates the changes that took place within the governing elite. He also documents the political opposition to the regime - both inside Poland and abroad - that resulted in upheavals in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. His narrative makes evident the pressures that the elite felt from above, from Moscow, and from below, from the population and from within the party. The history of Poland and the Poles is of special interest because on numerous occasions in the twentieth century this relatively small country influenced developments on a global scale.