The Polish Peasant in Europe and America

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is a book by Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas, considered to be one of the classics of sociology. The book is a study of Polish immigrants and their families, based on personal documents, and was published in five volumes in the years 1918 to 1920.

At the turn of the 20th century, Poles accounted for about a quarter of all new immigrants to the United States.Chicago was host to about 350,000 Poles and had the third largest population of Poles (after Warsaw and Łódź).

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was the culmination of research by American sociologist William I. Thomas and Polish scholar Florian Znaniecki, carried out primarily during their time at the University of Chicago and supported by a substantial grant from millionaire Helen Culver. It is a study of Polish immigrants to America and their families based on personal documents (primarily letters) as well as on documents such as brochures, newspaper articles, parish and court documents, and so on.

The work opens with an introduction, or Methodological Note, written primarily by Znaniecki, in which he discusses the history and structure of Polish countryside, and the study's methodology. This topic is of primary concern of tomes one and two, with tomes three to five focusing on the recent changes to the Polish countryside, and the transformation of Polish peasant-immigrants in America. The third tome's major focus is the analysis an autobiography of one peasant, Władysław Wiśniewski.

Thomas was the originator of this study, having taken interest in studying immigrant communities of Chicago already in the 1890s. He was also the originator of the concept of studying written materials for sociological insight, and initially intended this work to be a collection of translated and annotated primary documents. Znaniecki convinced him to extend this project into a larger work, one with a more detailed analysis of the topic subject, its methodology and corresponding theory.

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