br23 blog - minsk, belarus

As an ethnic group, Belarusians may be new to Americans but they are not newcomers to this country, and their first linkage with America may have been our ubiquitous soldier-adventurer Captain John Smith. Smith had traveled through Belarus in 1603 when it was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the craftsmen he brought to Virginia’s Jamestown Colony may, indeed, have been Belarusians. Some of the Jesuits who founded the first Catholic schools in the Maryland Colony were also believed to have a Belarusian connection, since their Maryland properties nominally belonged to Jesuits in the Belarus city of Polacak. And Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of the American Revolutionary War, was a Belarusian, before he became a Polish patriot.

Large-scale immigration of Belarusians to the United States began at the end of the nineteenth century, a result of the deteriorating economic situation in the homeland. Precise numbers are difficult to estimate because immigrants were classified by U.S. authorities according to their country of origin. For most Belarusians it meant either Russia or Poland and depended on whether they were Orthodox, Uniate or Catholc. Of those who arrived prior to World War I, an estimated 550,000-600,000 settled permanently in the United States.

From Da to Yes: Understanding the East Europeans, by Yale Richmond.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Belarusian history, America, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.