Streetcar Parishes

📖 The Scoop

Although the book is a test case that examines Slovaks in Philadelphia, this non-localized process of community formation was replicated by many immigrant communities throughout industrial America, and thus tells us much about the Progressive Era immigrant experience. An examination of parish records and fraternal-club minutes from across industrial America demonstrates this pattern of selective and expansive community building was employed elsewhere in the country such as western Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, industrial New Jersey, and Cleveland, where Slovaks were more numerous than in Philadelphia. As members of a small ethnic group, often laboring in isolated yet multiethnic settings, Slovaks often had no other option but to find community among co-ethnics in creative ways. Using the institutions they built themselves, not the accident of who lived next door, immigrants attained the material and psychic benefits that enabled them to survive. --Book Jacket.

Genre: History / Europe / General (fancy, right?)