Chicago was once known as the "Second Croatian Capital." Lured by economic, political, and social freedoms, Croatians, like other immigrants, came to Chicago in search of the American dream. The first documented groups settled mainly in Pilsen, Bridgeport, and the South Side in the late 1800s. By the turn of the century, these immigrants toiled in Chicago's steel mills, meatpacking plants, and construction sites. They soon formed social groups, churches, schools, Croatian-language newspapers, and other infrastructure needed to support the expanding community. Today there are more than 150,000 descendants of Croatian heritage in the Chicagoland area, and many of the foundations built by the forefathers continue to service the community. Ivan Metrovic ́'s "Indian" sculptures still adorn Congress Parkway and Michael Bilandic ́ remains in the history books as the only Croatian mayor of Chicago. Croatians of Chicagoland examines how this community and its leaders, clergy, laborers, politicians, athletes, benevolent societies, and social organizations helped build and shape Chicago's history.

For nearly 150 years, Pilsen has been a port of entry for thousands of immigrants. Mexicans, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Croatians, and Germans are some of the ethnic groups who passed through this "Ellis Island" on Chicago's Near Westside. Early generations came searching for work and found plenty of jobs in the lumber mills, breweries, family-run shops and large factories that took root here. Today most jobs exist outside of Pilsen, but the neighborhood is still home to a loyal population. Pilsen is compact but abounds with close-knit families, elaborate churches, mom-and-pop stores, and sturdy brick homes. Nearly 200 photographs from libraries, personal scrapbooks, and museums provide the evidence. Some notable people who walked the streets of Pilsen include Anton Cermak, Amalia Mendoza, George Hallas, Cesar Chavez, Judy Barr Topinka, and Stuart Dybek. Today the Pilsen schools are nurturing another generation of artists, athletes, and activists. Many Chicagoans and tourists from outside the city are rediscovering this colorful and historic neighborhood. Let this history book serve as their guide.

In 1991, Snezana Zabic lost her homeland and most of her family's book and record collection during the Yugoslav Wars that had been sparked by Slobodan Milosevic's relentless pursuit of power. She became a teenage refugee, forced to flee Croatia and the atrocities of war that had leveled her hometown of Vukovar. She and her family remained refugees in Serbia until NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. After witnessing the first nights of NATO's bombing, Zabic took flight again. She moved from country to country, city to city, finally settling in Chicago. She realized - reluctantly, because she didn't want to relive the past - that she had to write about what had happened, what she had left behind, and what she had lost. Broken Records is the story of this loss, told with unflinching honesty, free of sentimentality or sensationalism. For the very first time, we learn how it felt to be first a regular teenager during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars, and then a 30-something adult, perennially troubled by one's uprooted existence. Broken Records is not a neat narrative but a bit of everything - part bildungsroman, part memoir, part political poetry, part personal pop culture compendium. And while Zabic represents a Yugoslav diasporan subject, her book also belongs to an international generation whose formative years straddle the Cold War and the global reconfiguration of wealth and power, whose lives were spent shifting from the vinyl/analog era to the cyber/digital era. This generation knows that when they were told about history ending, they were told a lie.

Croatia gained the world's attention during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In this context its image has been overshadowed by visions of ethnic conflict and cleansing, war crimes, virulent nationalism, and occasionally even emergent regionalism. Instead of the norm, this book offers a diverse insight into Croatia in the 1990s by dealing with one of the consequences of the war: the more or less forcible migration of Croats from Serbia and their settlement in Croatia, their "ethnic homeland." This important study shows that at a time in which Croatia was perceived as a homogenized nation-in-the-making, there were tensions and ruptures within Croatian society caused by newly arrived refugees and displaced persons from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Refugees who, in spite of their common ethnicity with the homeland population, were treated as foreigners; indeed, as unwanted aliens.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "Her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic." --New York Times Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Vulture, Bustle, Refinery29, and Thrillist A visionary novel about our interconnected present, about the collision of horror and humanity, from a master of the spine-tingling tale. They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable. The characters in Samanta Schweblin's brilliant new novel, Little Eyes, reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls—but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world. Trusting strangers can lead to unexpected love, playful encounters, and marvelous adventure, but what happens when it can also pave the way for unimaginable terror? This is a story that is already happening; it's familiar and unsettling because it's our present and we're living it, we just don't know it yet. In this prophecy of a story, Schweblin creates a dark and complex world that's somehow so sensible, so recognizable, that once it's entered, no one can ever leave.

An inside look at the complex roots of Croatian history--from the earliest time to the present--as well as the many influences visitors will see on its towns, ports, and islands. One definite conclusion can be drawn about Croatia in the early 21st century: it has established itself as one of the worlds most coveted tourist destinations. Maps and line drawings.

"Zahra handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling." —Robert Levgold, Foreign Affairs Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations of human history, emptying out villages and irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind. With a keen historical perspective on the most consequential social phenomenon of the twentieth century, Tara Zahra shows how the policies that gave shape to this migration provided the precedent for future events such as the Holocaust, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and the tragedies of ethnic cleansing. In the epilogue, she places the current refugee crisis within the longer history of migration.