Our Fall 2013 issue explores our “new” Connecticans through stories about our state’s immigrant and migrant history. Though Connecticut’s early history was anything but diverse, by 1930 a whopping 65 percent of Connecticut’s population was foreign-born or first-generation American. Does this describe your heritage? Chances are it does!
Our photo essay features WWII War Relocation Authority images of Japanese Americans who were forced to leave their West Coast homes, interned in federal war relocation camps, and then later resettled in Connecticut. The University of Connecticut welcomed college-aged internees as students; UConn professor Cathy Schlund-Vials brings us this story.
We go all the way back to the first immigrants–the British–to explore their impact on Connecticut’s first residents, the Native American. It wasn’t long before European-borne smallpox and the Pequot War decimated native populations. Kevin McBride of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center recounts this dramatic period of our early history and tells us of current archaeological efforts to recover this history.
The issue also covers the Irish lasses who came to dominate domestic service in Connecticut’s wealthy households; the Portuguese who came to Stonington to work in the fishing industry; and a neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places settled by Russian immigrants fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Plus, a story of how the great migration of Southern blacks in the early 20th century transformed not only Connecticut but the small community of African Americans whose roots dated back to the colonial era.
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