Hamtramck -- Then and Now: A Sociological Study of a Polish-American Community

New York: Bookman Associates. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1955). First Edition. Hardcover. [minor shelfwear only; the jacket is lightly edgeworn, slightly color-shifted at spine]. (B&W photographs, maps) "A study of the political and social behavior of Polish immigrants and their children in Hamtramck, Michigan, a community which they have dominated since the first decade of the present century." Treating Hamtramck "as a sort of 'cultural island' within the Detroit Metropolitan Area," the book explains how "the principal economic base for Hamtramck, and the occasion for the swarming of the Poles into the area, was the establishment of the Dodge automobile plant on its southern border" in 1914, which contributed to Hamtramck becoming the fastest-growing community in the U.S. in the decade between 1910 and 1920. Also noted is that "the Poles took avidly to politics, and the intense rivalries among their politicians have kept the community in turmoil for over three decades." (Interestingly, the percentage of the population of Polish descent dropped from 90% in 1970 to 14.5% in 2010 -- and is probably even lower today, since, per Wikipedia, recent decades have seen the influx of "a large number of immigrants from the Middle East (especially Yemen), India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, and southeastern Europe (especially Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo)" -- to the point where, in 2013, Hamtramck became the first Muslim-majority city in the U.S., and in November 2021 became the first municipality in the U.S. to be entirely governed by Muslim-Americans (the mayor and the entire city council). ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .