The rise of immigrant communities and debates regarding their integration into host communities have become almost as topical in Germany as they have always been in the United States. It is less well known that Germany has had a history of immigration as old as America's, though the historiography is not as extensive yet. Comparative immigration history such as this work by Brian McCook is especially welcome for its richness and rigor. The author has written a model of comparative history, an examination of Polish immigrant experiences in Pennsylvania and the Ruhr in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and (for the purpose of this journal's readership) providing an excellent means of putting the German experience as a host community into greater context.

Happily, as McCook points out, these two regions were undergoing unusually similar processes, making the comparison even easier. Both were coal-mining areas, at early stages of unionization. The immigrant Poles also came from identical regions, with similar identification with their ethnicity and their Catholic faith. In both cases, too, the local employer was a huge, near monopolistic presence. The Poles themselves in both regions also had identical problems. They wished to maintain their identity, but they also had to work among strangers, making interaction and interdependence inevitable. How to balance maintenance of their ethnic identity with interaction with the surrounding community thus was a key problem.

It is a fascinating aspect of McCook's study that the same civic institutions could serve either for ethnic maintenance or for interaction, and that the balance had to be negotiated within each institution. The Catholic church provides an excellent example. Whereas in the Ruhr the church (similarly under governmental attack) became a fortress, in Pennsylvania a more multiethnic church threatened also to become a means of undermining ethnic identity. Some Polish parishes there even briefly seceded from the church to form specifically Polish-Catholic churches, a measure that would have been pointless and even harmful in the Ruhr.

The labor movement, likewise, provides an interesting contrast. As mine workers, local Poles faced the same problems of wages and working conditions as their non-Polish brethren did. Local employees were initally hostile to the new Polish workers, but soon found that they were quick learners, both regarding their work and their working conditions. While Poles in the Ruhr formed their own labor unions that collaborated with German unions but also became vehicles for ethnic solidarity, Poles in Pennsylvania came to join the United Mine Workers as individuals and were integrated as such into the larger workers' community.

The creation of a public sphere outside the workplace occurred quite differently, too. Poles in the Ruhr lived more often in subsidized and paternalistic company housing, while those in Pennsylvania did not. The Pennsylvania Poles, having little political or economic infrastructure to rely on, had to build not only their own civic associations, but also their own supportive businesses; these, in turn, linked the community into the surrounding community. In contrast, Ruhr Poles founded fewer of their own businesses. All of these factors, according to McCook, integrated Poles and Polish organizations into the larger community.

State policies themselves played a role, as well. Clearly, the Prussian efforts at “Germanization” did much to solidify Polish identity, as did continued police monitoring of Poles in the Ruhr. In contrast, authorities in Pennsylvania engaged in nothing comparable in scale or scope. Polish identity there could find its own level. While Poles were not initially citizens and thus started at a relative disadvantage to Poles in the Ruhr on this score, the process of acquiring American citizenship and building a stake served as integrative tools, and the greater degree of civic and legal equality that Poles enjoyed in the United States proved to be a greater boon in the long run.

In comparative history, the environments compared are just as much an object of study as is the population itself, and McCook's work highlights salient aspects of German policies. “Germanization” for Poles in Prussia merely bolstered Polish cohesion in the Ruhr, for example, but the contrast with Pennsylvania only serves to highlight Germanization's failures. In Pennsylvania equal citizenship and economic rootedness facilitated the process of integration, while not discouraging the expression of ethnic identity. Creating what became in effect their own Polish civil society, without a reinforcing political marginalization, produced a viable balance of identity maintenance while allowing Poles to feel members of a larger nonethnic community as well. In the Ruhr, they did not, and it comes as no surprise that Poles there felt less at home than they did in Pennsylvania.

There is much more content and contrast here, including comparisons of the roles of wage rates, labor mobility, social mobility, unionization rates, and local perspectives on the immigrant community. But this is by no means a complete list; there is more here that can be dealt with in a brief review. Overall, the author has taken rich resources in three languages, applied well-developed templates, and has come to compelling conclusions. His book does not strictly concern German history, but this is to its advantage and to the advantage of German scholars of migration, ethnicity, and social policy, who will glean much from it.