Greeks in America; An Account of Their Coming, Progress, Customs, Living, and Aspirations with an Historical Introduction and the Stories of Some Famous American Greeks (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT In the preceding chapter we saw how the Greeks earned their living; let us now go back and deal with another side of their life in America. Here have come these hordes from the homeland to a life among a strange people and language and customs and laws and forms of religion. It has not been a question of the individual coming and fighting alone, but of a great migration. Thus it is for us to investigate the interesting means by which they have banded themselves together for mutual support and communication and to keep alive the patriotism, the religion, and the customs of the fatherland. Then, too, we must consider that fundamental social factor, all important to the salvation of the colonies of men, the bringing over of their families. We will treat all this under the following heads: Communities, Societies, Newspapers, Books, Families, and Schools. COMMUNITIES To use the k. Canoutas' distinction, we will apply the word "colony" (mipoiKia) as a general term to any group of Greeks of a given locality; and "community" (koivottjs) as a specializedterm designating a regularly organized colony, centering on a church organization, and always called "The Orthodox Greek Community." The rise of the community in America was on this wise. It was at the beginning of the period of induced immigration, in 1891, by which time the Greeks were gathered in some of the large cities in colonies numbering a few hundreds, that Prince George, the second son of the Greek Monarch, passed through the United States. He was returning home from a visit to Japan, where, it will be remembered, he saved the Czar of Russia's life from the assassin's hand. On landing in San Francisco, he was met by a demonstration of a few hundred Greeks. While stopping for a time in New York...