| Through the lens of three Chicago suburbs, this dissertation charts the history of ethnic community formation and ethnicity in the twentieth century. Examining German Jews in Highland Park, Irish Catholics in Beverly, and Czechs in Cicero, it traces transformations in ethnicity through changes in the definitions of community boundaries from the 1920s through the 1960s. Careful examination of ethnic populations in Chicago's suburbs reveals not the disappearance of ethnicity as other historians have postulated, but its persistence across this period. Expressions of ethnicity and the relationship of the ethnic group to the mainstream population shifted over time, but those communities were still very much guided by ethnic associations even as late as the 1960s. Moreover, although ethnic groups did increasingly express racial identities in postwar America, that adaptation was a pragmatic choice to maintain community; rather than representing an abandonment of ethnic community, whiteness worked in tandem with ethnicity to preserve those suburban communities.;This dissertation asserts that the history of ethnicity in the twentieth century can be understood through definitions of community boundaries and their change over time---from rigid and exclusive in the 1920s, bringing ethnic populations into conflict with other groups, to non-geographic definitions of community in the 1930s, to expansive boundaries in the 1950s. Finally, in the 1960s, porous and non-exclusive boundaries made it possible for ethnic groups to unite under racial or religious labels in order to preserve traditional definitions of community. Just as community boundaries looked different in 1960 than they had in 1920, so too did ethnicity---it became less exclusive, making it possible for ethnic suburbanites of different groups to come together under racial banners for the good of the neighborhood. Yet, even within these larger groups, ethnic participants maintained a sense of difference; coalescence and cooperation did not indicate the erasure of ethnic difference. |
