Race and America's Immigrant Press

Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: "Let Each Reader Judge": Lynching, Race and Immigrant Newspapers Chapter 3: Spectacles of Difference: Notions of Race Pre-Migration Chapter 4: "A Slav Can Live in Dirt That Would Kill a White Man': Race and the European 'Other' Chapter 5: "Ceaselessly Restless Savages": Colonialism and Empire in the Immigrant Press Chapter 6: "Like a Thanksgiving Celebration without Turkey": Minstrel Shows Chapter 7: "We Took Our Rightful Places": Defended Job Sites, Defended Neighborhoods Chapter 8: Conclusion Bibliography Index

Robert M. Zecker is an associate professor of history at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He has published numerous articles (most recently "'Let Each Reader Judge': Lynching Accounts in the Foreign Press" in the fall 2009 Journal of American Ethnic History.)

Finally, we have a book that offers a rich account of American race relations as immigrants understood them, and read and wrote about them in their own languages. Based on a thorough reading of the Slovak language mainstream and labor press, this book will surprise, challenge and influence all scholars interested in whiteness. -- Donna R. Gabaccia, Director, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota The many-sided brilliance of this book provides a model for the study of how new immigrants learned about the U.S. racial system. It roots its story on both sides of the Atlantic, reads the immigrant press carefully, and demonstrates how often and tragically the production of racial ideology lay at the heart of media, popular culture, and social relations.--David Roediger (University of Illinois) is the author of How Race Survived U.S. History If, as Benedict Anderson argues, newspapers play a central role in the forging of national identities, Zecker's study of Slovak-American newspapers demonstrates that in the U.S., immigrant newspapers forged an imagined community of hyphenated Americans who understood themselves as white. The book's comprehensive analysis of the Slovak and Russian press's coverage of lynching and the U.S.'s imperial war in the Philippines, as well as minstrel show jokes, commentaries on Jews, Asiatic Magyar despots, African "cannibals", and Italian and Mexican "bandits" brings together the insights from scholars of ethnic survival, European imperialism, Orientalism, and whiteness studies. While maintaining empathy for struggling, impoverished and "not quite white" Slavic immigrants," Zecker reminds us that not all the culture that immigrants brought with them to America was worthy of celebration, and that being the target of racial prejudice rarely leads to an opposition to racism or a rejection of whiteness. Instead, he shows that for many Slavs, acculturation to the U.S. meant exchanging old-world prejudices against Jews and