For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History)

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desertcart.com: For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History): 9780521306331: Morawska, Ewa: Books Review: East European Migratory Labor to the US 1890-1940 - Prof. Morawska has taken a piece of East European interaction with the U.S. pre-WWI to WWII, and has provided an outstanding description of the trials, tribulations, and successes of these migratory workers during that time. In many ways, we are more used to the stories of the East Europeans immigrating and moving to Chicago or other major metropolitan areas, and the issues they had there, and treating them as a single ethnic group. Prof. Moraswka examines these many East European ethnicities and nationalities discretely, so that the reader can see, perhaps, the differences between the experiences of the Magyars vs. the Poles or Slavs. She spreads a wider net, showing these peoples had more complex backgrounds and experiences in the US than just a unitary tale. She also shows how the experience of coming to Johnstown changed these workers from basically peasants to industrial workers, together with the tension and pain these new experiences caused, (We tend to forget that during time in question, Johnstown was a major provider of steel for the nation, having been overshadowed by Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cleveland.) Strongly recommend reading for both the history of the area, but also to see if there might be corollaries between the cyclic migratory workers of that time frame and those of today.