In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the
United States. 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. In 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 important, their 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. Often within a single generation, Welsh cultural
institutions would begin to fade and a new "Welsh American"
identity developed.
True to the perspective of the Welsh themselves, Lewis's analysis
adopts a transnational view of immigration, examining the
maintenance of Welsh coal-mining culture in the United States and
in Wales. By focusing on 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 rapidly industrializing America.