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Balkan Minds: Transnational Nationalism And The Transformation Of South Slavic Immigrant Identity In Chicago, 1890-1941, Dejan Kralj

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At the start of the twentieth century, America was inundated with unskilled workers eager to fuel the engines of the new economy. The South Slavs of the Balkans joined countless others from the furthest corners of the European continent during the final years of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. Millions of foreign and unfamiliar faces, outlandishly clad, replaced the previous fair-haired and fair-skinned Western Europeans that originally populated the nation. These innumerably diverse peoples of eastern and southern European origin redefined the character of twentieth-century America.

The vast majority of South Slavic immigrants arrived in …