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Start Over Creator Eckert, Eva

3. Letters sustaining cross-Atlantic migrations: From Frenštát, Moravia to Frenstat, Texas in the decades following the Civil War /

Creator:
Eckert, Eva
Type:
text and studie
Subject:
Mezinárodní migrace, exil, kolonizace, vystěhovalectví, korespondence, vztahy česko-americké, vystěhovalci, život každodenní, Češi američtí, české země 1848-1914, USA, světové dějiny 1789-1918, migrace, vystěhovalectví, kolonizace, and zahraniční politika, mezinárodní vztahy
Language:
English
Rights:
unknown

4. Po stopách českých vystěhovaců do Texasu

Creator:
Eckert, Eva
Format:
print
Type:
model:internalpart and TEXT
Language:
Czech
Description:
From the middle of the 19th century to World War One several thousand peasants from the borderlands of Moravia and Slovakia, and peripherial northeastern regions of Bohemia and Moravia emigrated to Texas. The earliest adventurers who came to Texas from Bohemia wrote letters back home and were followed by peasants running from poverty. The news spread among peasants who followed the leaders, mainly after the Civil War (1861 — 1865) from Moravia where economic prospects for peasants, laborers and weavers were hopeless. They needed to get out of Austria to escape mounting threats of accumulated debts, eviction and job loss, and wanted to provide for their children. They went where the land was cheap and weather good. That they ended up in Texas was due, at least initially, to the game of events. They read about Texas in paper or somehow got the news of the free land policy of the Texas Republic. The idea that they could own hundreds of acres must have sounded like a fairy tale to peasants who depended on a couple of acres or to landless laborers. Ultimately, they were attracted by those who went ahead, whom they knew and whose letters of success convinced them that the dream of America could come true. The catalyst of their journey were external forces of historical conflicts and economic shifts that impacted the European continent as well as internal regional and individual reasons. On the daily basis, they translated into unemployment, hunger, land depletion and fear of the future, and inspired masses to seek solution outside their homeland. They came at a time when Texas sought to attract immigrants who would colonize unbroken prairies and take over abandoned plantations, and lured them to abundant land and prosperity. The immigrants arrived at the time when the Civil War defeat and the abolition of slavery devastated the Texas plantation economy; Texas needed their labor and sought it assertively at a time when Bohemia and Moravia suffered consequences of the lost Austro-Prussian war and decline of weaving industry. The immigrants replaced the black slaves on the land they bought from plantation owners and ushered in three decades of economic growth. Given major cultural differences between central Europe of the post 1848 revolutionary period and the Texas plantation culture crumbling under the effects of the Civil War, it is not surprising that the immigrants did not readily identify with America. They didreplace their national costume for Texan cowboy boots but slowly and hesitantly.
Rights:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ and policy:public