Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields. By Ronald L. Lewis. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xii, 395 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3220-2.)

Abstract

In Welsh Americans, the historian Ronald L. Lewis reconstructs the world of a largely forgotten group of immigrants who profoundly shaped American industry between the Civil War and World War I. The Welsh who came to America during that era possessed knowledge of industrial production that allowed them to thrive in the nation's coalfields. Their cultural affinity with Americans made advancement easier, but, Lewis argues, it also led to rapid assimilation and the loss of cultural distinctiveness. The author begins this important study with an examination of industrialization in Wales, the development of Welsh identity, and the out-migration of industrial workers in the second half of the 1800s. Welsh immigrants tended to congregate in Pennsylvania and Ohio. In the former, the anthracite coalfields attracted the most Welsh immigrant miners, with Scranton boasting the largest concentration. Later, the Welsh were central to the development of the industrial center of Youngstown, helping to build the coal, iron, and steel industries of that city. Lewis documents influential Welsh immigrants wherever those industries expanded, from West Virginia to Utah to Alabama and parts in between.