Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields

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Description

In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the USA. A majority of them were skilled laborers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies. Readily accepted by American society, Welsh immigrants experienced a unique process of acculturation. Within the first history of this exceptional community, Ronald Lewis explores how Welsh immigrants made a significant contribution to the development of the American coal industry and how their rapid and successful assimilation affected Welsh American culture.

Lewis describes how Welsh immigrants brought their national churches, fraternal orders and societies, love of literature and music, and, most necessary, their very own language. Yet unlike eastern and southern Europeans and the Irish, the Welsh–even with their “foreign” ways–encountered no apparent hostility from the Americans. Incessantly within a single generation, Welsh cultural institutions would start to fade and a new “Welsh American” identity developed.

True to the viewpoint of the Welsh themselves, Lewis’s analysis adopts a transnational view of immigration, examining the maintenance of Welsh coal-mining culture in the USA and in Wales. By that specialize in Welsh coal miners, Welsh Americans illuminates how Americanization occurred among a distinct group of skilled immigrants and demonstrates the diversity of the labor migrations to a hastily industrializing The united states.

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