After the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1848 and 1849, thousands of Hungarians fled to the United States, an influx dubbed the Kossuth Emigration after failed revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth. During the American Civil War, many of these Kossuth emigres joined the ranks of the Union or Confederate armies. The book explores their motivations and the military role they played, often challenging the hero-making mechanisms of traditional ethnic history-writing that has gone before. The lengthy biographical dictionary of all Hungarian-born Civil War participants fills a longstanding gap in Civil War genealogy. With a deft blend of modern Civil War studies, military history, migration and ethnic studies, and historical memory, this study makes a significant contribution to the history of Hungarian-Americans and the often overlooked subject of non-nationals in the Civil War.

The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet. In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.

When a foundry of the National Malleable Castings Company transferred over 200 Hungarian workers from its home plant in Cleveland to its new East Toledo site the Birmingham neighborhood quickly became a working class Hungarian enclave. It thrived through the 20th century and today remains a vital area of the city. Hungraian American Toledo tells its story.

This book describes the transatlantic experience of Austrian and Hungarian migrants from 1870 to 1960. Through socio-economic, demographic, and cultural analyses, the authors recount how newly arrived immigrants struggled to adapt to the new sociocultural mores of America while upholding their own traditions and language. This study breaks new ground by examining migration between the Habsburg Monarchy and North America and return migration to Central Europe, including the study of various ethnic and religious groups.

This book examines Soviet agriculture in post-1945 Hungary. It demonstrates how the agrarian lobby, a development following the 1956 revolution, led to contact with the West which allowed for the creation of an effective agricultural system. The author argues that this ‘Hungarian agricultural miracle,’ a hybrid of American technology and Soviet structures, was fundamental to the success of Hungarian collectivization.

Written shortly after the close of World War II, Escaping Extermination tells the poignant story of war, survival, and rebirth for a young, already acclaimed, Jewish Hungarian concert pianist, Agi Jambor. From the hell that was the siege of Budapest to a fresh start in America. Agi Jambor describes how she and her husband escaped the extermination of Hungary’s Jews through a combination of luck and wit. As a child prodigy studying with the great musicians of Budapest and Berlin before the war, Agi played piano duets with Albert Einstein and won a prize in the 1937 International Chopin Piano Competition. Trapped with her husband, prominent physicist Imre Patai, after the Nazis overran Holland, they returned to the illusory safety of Hungary just before the roundup of Jews to be sent to Auschwitz was about to begin. Agi participated in the Resistance, often dressed as a prostitute in seductive clothes and heavy makeup, calling herself Maryushka. Under constant threat by the Gestapo and Hungarian collaborators, the couple was forced out of their flat after Agi gave birth to a baby who survived only a few days. They avoided arrest by seeking refuge in dwellings of friendly Hungarians, while knowing betrayal could come at any moment. Facing starvation, they saw the war end while crouching in a cellar with freezing water up to their knees. After moving to America in 1947, Agi made a brilliant new career as a musician, feminist, political activist, professor, and role model for the younger generation. She played for President Harry Truman in the White House, performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and became a recording artist with Capitol Records. Unpublished until now but written in the immediacy of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Escaping Extermination is a story of hope, resilience, and even humor in the fight against evil.