ABSTRACT
The history of Polish America begins abroad, for it is the story not only of why Polish men and women came to the United States but why they left their Polish homes. Rural Poland was a turbulent place in the nineteenth century, when large numbers of Poles first began to emigrate, looking for work and "for bread." In the nineteenth century, Polish rural society became a cauldron of social and economic change in which a population increase, the expansion of commercial agriculture, and the growth of transportation, industry, and urban markets would forever disrupt the manorial world. Government authorities, ever mindful of the fragility of their hold on the Polish provinces, became obsessed with the need to colonize German settlers there and Germanize the Poles. The economic development of the Russian Polish territories differed markedly from that of German and Austrian Poland but left no less rural distress in its wake.
