Streetcar Parishes Slovask Immigrants Build Their Nonlocal Communities, 1890-1945

This book examines how small immigrant groups created a community for themselves if they could never control their own piece of the city, an ethnic ghetto, in which all or nearly all residents shared the same Old Country home. For many immigrants, community was not geographically circumscribed. Creative means existed for drawing widely dispersed people back into an institutionally based community centered on churches, social clubs, fraternal societies, and sporting leagues.

Robert M. Zecker is the author of Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture and numerous articles in journals such as The Journal of American Ethnic History, American Studies, The Oral History Review. The Journal of Social History, and The Journal of Popular Culture. He is currently working on a book on race and the immigrant press and is associate professor of history at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.