"A clear and comprehensive guide to the religious and secular life of the Greek-American community," including naming a baby, planning a baptism, observing name days, baking communion bread, buying popular Greek music, what to say (in Greek) on special occasions, and much more.

This is an engrossing account of Greek Americans--their history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. This is the story of immigrants, their children and grandchildren, most of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of this country's most successful ethnic groups.

This is an engrossing account of Greek Americans--their history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. This is the story of immigrants, their children and grandchildren, most of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of this country's most successful ethnic groups.

This is an engrossing account of Greek Americans—their history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. Blending sociological insight with historical detail, Peter C. and Charles C. Moskos trace the Greek-American experience from the wave of mass immigration in the early 1900s to today. This is the story of immigrants, most of whom worked hard to secure middle-class status. It is also the story of their children and grandchildren, many of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of America’s most successful ethnic groups. As the authors rightly note, the true measure of Greek-Americans is the immigrants themselves who came to America without knowing the language and without education. They raised solid families in the new country and shouldered responsibilities for those in the old. They laid the basis for an enduring Greek-American community. Included in this completely revised edition is an introduction by Michael Dukakis and chapters relating to the early struggles of Greeks in America, the Greek Orthodox Church, success in America, and the survival and expansion of Greek identity despite intermarriage. This work will be of value to scholars of ethnic studies, those interested in Greek culture and communities, and sociologists and historians.

Greeks in Queens is an interesting history of this often unwritten about New York community. By the early 1900s, New York was becoming a melting pot for immigrants hailing from different nations. Though many settlers chose Manhattan as their home, others ventured forward into the borough of Queens. America itself was named the land of opportunity, and Greeks seeking those opportunities developed the largest Greek community outside of Athens in Astoria. Through the growth of the Greek community came Greek Orthodox schools and churches, the earliest in Queens being St. Demetrios, built in 1927, and Greek-owned businesses, especially catering halls like Crystal Palace, coffee shops (that now line busy Astoria streets), and diners. These establishments gave this special community a place to gather together and secure its standing and future in New York. Greeks in Queens traces the immigrant journey from Greece to America and shows how the Greeks--through wars, hard work, education, and dedication--developed a thriving and much larger community than their predecessors thought possible.

In this sweeping history, Alexander Kitroeff shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country's million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants. Assuming the responsibility of running Greek-language schools and encouraging local parishes to engage in cultural and social activities, the church became the most important Greek American institution and shaped the identity of Greeks in the United States. Kitroeff digs into these traditional activities, highlighting the American church's dependency on the "mother church," the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the use of Greek language in the Sunday liturgy. Today, as this rich biography of the church shows us, Greek Orthodoxy remains in between the Old World and the New, both Greek and American.

The Greek Fire examines the United States' early global influence as the fledgling nation that inserted itself in conflicts that were oceans away. Maureen Connors Santelli focuses on the American fascination with and involvement in the Greek Revolution in the 1820s and 1830s. That nationalist movement incited an American philhellenic movement that pushed the borders of US interests into the eastern Mediterranean and infused a global perspective into domestic conversations concerning freedom and reform. Perceiving strong cultural, intellectual, and racial ties with Greece, American men and women identified Greece as the seedbed of American democracy and a crucial source of American values. From Maryland to Missouri and Maine to Georgia, grassroots organizations sent men, money, and supplies to aid the Greeks. Defending the modern Greeks from Turkish slavery and oppression was an issue on which northerners and southerners agreed. Philhellenes, often led by women, joined efforts with benevolence and missionary groups and together they promoted humanitarianism, education reform, and evangelism. Public pressure on the US Congress, however, did not result in intervention on behalf of the Greeks. Commercial interests convinced US officials, who wished to cultivate commercial ties with the Ottomans, to remain out of the conflict. The Greek Fire analyzes the role of Americans in the Greek Revolution and the aftermath of US involvement. In doing so, Santelli revises understandings of US involvement in foreign affairs, and she shows how diplomacy developed at the same time as Americans were learning what it meant to be a country, and what that country stood for.

My Detroit is a unique blend of traditional ethnic memoir and a historian's account of the decline and fall of America's most populous industrial city. The interaction of American culture and ethnic consciousness is evident on almost every page. Archbishop Iakovos marches with Martin Luther King, Maria Callas becomes as famous as Marilyn Monroe. Greek diners become neighborhood hangouts. The reader is taken in ever widening circles from the particulars of Greek American culture to the core of an embattled Motor City awash in racism and corruption.

Promotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The work moves beyond the “single group” approach—an approach that privileges the study of ethnic singularity––to explore instead two ethnic groups in relation to each other in the broader context of the United States. The chapters bring into focus transcultural interfaces and inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. This co-edited volume contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. The book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, and film studies, as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as that of popular culture, including visual representations (documentary, film, TV series) and “low brow” crime fiction. It includes analysis of literature. It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories, translocal interconnections in the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. This volume is the first of its kind in initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

New York Times Bestseller Editors' Choice —New York Times Book Review "Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book. On every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in our country." —James Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (ret.) & 26th Secretary of Defense The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation. On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world. The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew. First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.