Welsh in Metro America - by Robert Llewellyn Tyler Hardcover

About the Book

This book provides a micro-study of Welsh-American communities in four cities. The true nature of these communities is considered, as is their rapid, almost seamless acculturation, assimilation, and absorption into mainstream America.

Book Synopsis

Through a consideration of settlement patterns, economic activity, language use, and cultural and religious institutions, The Welsh in Metro America: Respectability and Assimilation in San Francisco, Seattle, Columbus, and Milwaukee, 1870-1930 provides a micro study of four Welsh immigrant communities in urban America. This book endeavors to understand the strength and long-term viability of these communities and the ways in which they changed by analyzing the forces that enabled Welsh immigrants and their children to so rapidly become Welsh Americans and, ultimately, to almost seamlessly enter the mainstream world of white, English-speaking, Protestant America.

Review Quotes

"The Welsh in Metro America is a significant achievement in several ways. It displays a mastery of the Welsh language and culture and is a model on how to use manuscripts and the Census to unlock mysteries about the Welsh--one of America's most interesting and understudied immigrant groups. Moreover, it is elegantly written and full of fascinating stories about the people who left Wales for American cities, their variety of experience, how they succeeded, how they assimilated, what they contributed, and how they became Americans."

"In this innovative study, Robert Tyler investigates the Welsh migrant experience in urban America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He exposes, via a wide range of evidence, including census returns and newspaper reports, settlement patterns and the shifting identity of the Welsh diaspora. In this detailed analysis, which is not only well written and accessible to all readers, he lifts the lid on what has remained for a long time a hidden history by examining the economic status of these Welsh-Americans, particularly drawing attention to their shifting occupational fortunes as well as the social, cultural, and religious practices of these modern migrant communities in four centres across America, from Ohio to California. He carefully discusses the extent to which these distinct communities continued to exist over several generations and how they did so, albeit with their gradual assimilation into the wider reality of being American citizens with the consequential dilution of their cultural markers and the ability to speak the Welsh language, and ultimately having to accept a new identity in an homogenised America, so common an experience for many European migrants."

"This exciting work on immigration history tracks the Welsh experience in select American urban environments. By looking at communities, theirlong-term viability and changes, in and throughcultural and religious expression, language, settlement patterns, and occupations, Tyler builds a nuanced and insightful analysis of the Welsh settlers. His look at community formations and management and fluid and shifting expressions of identity is both engaging and revealing."

About the Author

Robert Llewellyn Tyler is associate professor at the American University of Armenia.