A World to Gain: Immigrants, Blacks, and the Creation of Hybrid Communities in the Midwestern U.S.

FAIN: FT-51893-03

Caroline Waldron Merithew
University of Dayton (Dayton, OH 45469-0001)

A World to Gain explores how global transformations and local circumstances kindled interethnic and interracial contact and, in turn, how the interaction propelled the creation of a hybrid community between the 1880s and 1930s. The evolution of hybridity was tied to the demographic contours of a particular place -- Illinois' coalfields -- and multiple places around the world. The analytical centerpiece of my investigation queries how and why immigrants, Blacks, and native-born whites defined their interests in common or apart and the possibilities and problems they encountered in doing so. In this hybrid community, the global and the local were inseparable and would mold the new ways men and women perceived themselves and others.