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• A Conversation
• On the Edge, In the World
• Democracy as Civilizing Mission
• The Integration Myth
• The Many Meanings of the Border
• Polish Towns? Jewish Towns?
• Depoliticizing the Volhynian Village
• Regionalism, or The Limits of Inclusion
• Thinking Technocratically

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs. Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A Conversation
• On the Edge, In the World
• Democracy as Civilizing Mission
• The Integration Myth
• The Many Meanings of the Border
• Polish Towns? Jewish Towns?
• Depoliticizing the Volhynian Village
• Regionalism, or The Limits of Inclusion
• Thinking Technocratically.

"In 1918, as Europe's continental empires were violently replaced with a patchwork of nominally post-imperial nation-states, elites in Poland drew on the global language of civilization to launch a state-building mission in the non-ethnically Polish, nationally contested, and war-torn region of Volhynia. By following eastward in the footsteps of border guards, military settlers, provincial administrators, regional activists, health professionals, urban planners, teachers, and academics, the work traces how a colorful cast of characters adapted the prevailing language of European imperialism while simultaneously rejecting the very idea that they could act imperialistically in an historically Polish borderland. Their tension-ridden approaches were never static. Some Polish nationalists declared that they alone could act as benign civilizational conduits in mainly Ukrainian villages and predominantly Jewish towns, while others attempted to craft a regional identity. But by the eve of the Second World War, the province had become a testing ground for visions of demographic transformation that favoured antisemitic schemes of Jewish emigration and the forced assimilation of non-Polish Slavs. Throughout, doubts about the national strength of local Poles, competitions between diverse groups of self-declared civilizers, and mounting anxieties about the rise of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, meant that Volhynia served as an arena for redefining the precise contours of the modern Polish nation. Rather than simply a successor state embroiled in the quintessentially east European problem of "national minorities," Poland was a place where people engaged with the concept of civilization, recasting its meaning in conceptual spaces between empire and nation-state"-- Provided by publisher.

• Na początku : Settling in Illinois
• Rodzina : Family life
• Praca : Poles in industrial Illinois
• Wiara : Faith and religious life
• Polonia : Polish community life in Illinois
• Czykago : Capital of Polonia
• Kultura : Polish and Polish American culture in Illinois
• Po Wojnie : Poles in Illinois during the Cold War era
• Dzis i wczoraj : Poles in Illinois, today and yesterday
• Appendixes
• Polish parishes in Illinois
• Polish schools in Illinois, 1946 and 1959
• Polish newspapers in Illinois

Illinois boasts one of the most visible concentrations of Poles in the United States. Chicago is home to one of the largest Polish ethnic communities outside Poland itself. Yet no one has told the full story of our state's large and varied Polish community-until now. Poles in Illinois is the first comprehensive history to trace the abundance and diversity of this ethnic group throughout the state from the 1800s to the present. Authors John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel look at family life among Polish immigrants, their role in the economic development of the state, the working conditions they experienced, and the development of their labor activism. Close-knit Polish American communities were often centered on parish churches but also focused on fraternal and social groups and cultural organizations. Polish Americans, including waves of political refugees during World War II and the Cold War, helped shape the history and culture of not only Chicago, the 'capital' of Polish America, but also the rest of Illinois with their music, theater, literature, food. With forty-seven photographs and an ample number of extensive excerpts from first-person accounts and Polish newspaper articles, this captivating, highly readable book illustrates important and often overlooked stories of this ethnic group in Illinois and the changing nature of Polish ethnicity in the state over the past two hundred years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Poland will treasure this rich and important part of the state's history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• On the fringes of imperial formations : the German civilizing mission in the Prussian-Polish provinces
• Disease, race, and space
• Intersecting roads : the medical and colonizing missions in German Africa
• "For your freedom and ours" : Polish travel accounts and colonial fantasies in Africa
• Creating the Polish nation abroad : the establishment of Polish colonies in Brazil.

Urena Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• On the fringes of imperial formations : the German civilizing mission in the Prussian-Polish provinces
• Disease, race, and space
• Intersecting roads : the medical and colonizing missions in German Africa
• "For your freedom and ours" : Polish travel accounts and colonial fantasies in Africa
• Creating the Polish nation abroad : the establishment of Polish colonies in Brazil.

Urena Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)