Research Guides: Greek American Studies: Guide

Did you know that March is Greek American Heritage Month? To support the celebration, we are featuring several exemplary ebooks and streaming videos available via the Benjamin S. Rosenthal online library. Greek American scholars and students study the complexities of Greek immigrant assimilation within American ethnic identity. Currently over 2.5 million Americans are of Greek descent. One in seven speak Greek at home. Greek Americans have the highest concentrations in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Greek-Americans strive to preserve their culture, religion and language. New York has the highest concentration of Greek Americans and Queens College the most of any college at 1500!

Queens College offers courses on Byzantine and Modern Greek topics, through the Center for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies and the European Language and Literature's Modern Greek department.

Getting started with this guide

The Library has a growing collection of books, films, and more in Greek American studies!

For help with finding more resources like these please contact me.

Ask any research librarian available for help through our Ask Us research service!

Get started by reading this 2004 article on The Now and Future Greek America by Dan Georgakas, then Director of the Greek American Studies Project of the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College, CUNY.

Those interested in Greek American identity in the media will enjoy this essay, The Greek American Image in American Cinema also by Dan Georgakas. He examines the portrayal of Greeks and Greek Americans in a filmography of over 100 films.

Queens College is home to the Hellenic-American Oral History, Greek American Project! Learn about this project led by QC Sociology professor, Dr. Nicolas Alexiou, of oral histories and census data documenting the Greek American presence in the United States. With related links to The Modern Greek Studies Association portal, an interview with Prof Alexiou and more!

Books

Narratives of place, culture and identity second generation Greek-American's return 'home' by Anastasia Christou
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2006
"Christou explores the phenomenon of ‘return migration’ in Greece through the settlement and identification processes of second-generation Greek-American returning migrants. She examines the meanings attached to the experience of return migration...The human geography of return migration extends beyond geographic movement into a diasporic journey involving (re)constructions of homeness and belongingness in the ancestral homeland."
Greeks in Michigan by Stavros Frangos
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2004
The influence of Greek culture on Michigan began long before the first Greeks arrived. The American settlers of the Old Northwest Territory had definite notions of Greeks and Greek culture. America and its developing society and culture were to be the "New Athens," a locale where the resurgence in the values and ideals of classical Greece were to be reborn. Stavros K. Frangos describes how such preconceptions and the competing desires to retain heritage and to assimilate have shaped the Greek experience in Michigan.
Greek Americans : struggle and success by Moskos, Peter C. and Moskos, Charles C.
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2017
"This is an engrossing account of Greek Americans--their history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. This is the story of immigrants, their children and grandchildren, most of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of this country's most successful ethnic groups."
Adoption, memory, and Cold War Greece : kid pro quo? by Gonda Van Steen
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2019
"This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, also for the hundreds of adoptees and their descendants, whose lives are still affected today."

Books continued

Astoria : exile people places by Alexiou, Nicholas
Call Number: Level 5 PA5638.1.L486 A93 2013
Publication Date: 2013
"Although the Astoria section of New York has been considered the largest Hellenic settlement outside of Greece or Cyprus, it is striking that it has received relatively little attention by writers, artists, and social scientists. The present bilingual book of poems and images, both as a physical object and as a discursive project, is about a culturally neglected enclave in the midst of ethnic and social transformations...Poet and Diplomat Yiorgos Chouliaras states: “Alexiou’s poetry is strikingly visual and lyrically obsessive.”
The religion of ethnicity : belief and belonging in a Greek-American community by Gary A. Kunkelman
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2019
"The integrative role of religion has been a recurrent theme of sociological and anthropological theory. This role is apparent in the Greek-American community; religion functions as a cement of the social fabric. Indeed, it would be hard to overestimate the role of Greek Orthodoxy in joining people of Greek ancestry into a community and reinforcing their sense of ethnic identity. The nature of ethnic identity and the church’s role in fostering and sustaining it are subjects of this study, first published in 1990."
Contours of White Ethnicity Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America by Yiorgos Anagnostou
Call Number: online
"Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences.
Contents
The politics and poetics of popular ethnography : folk immigrant, ethnic, and racial pasts in history and discourse -- Whither collective ethnic identities? White ethnics and the slippery terrain of European Americanness -- Whose ethnic community? Gendered pasts and polyphonies of belonging -- Interrogating ethnic whiteness, building interracial solidarity : popular ethnography as cultural critique -- Ethnicity as choice? Roots and identity as a narrative project -- Redirecting ethnic options : historical routes of heritage."
Educating Greek Americans by Fevronia K. Soumakis (Editor); Theodore G. Zervas (Editor)
ISBN: 3030398269
Publication Date: 2020-05-20
This edited collection considers Greek American formal and informal educational efforts, institutions, and programs, broadly conceived, as they evolved over time throughout the United States. The book's focus on Greek Americans aims to highlight the vast array of educational responses to local needs and contexts as this distinct, yet, heterogeneous immigrant community sought to maintain its linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage for over one hundred years. The chapters in this volume amend the scholarly literature that thus far has not only overlooked Greek American educational initiatives, but has also neglected to recognize and analyze the community's persistence in sustaining them. This book is an important contribution to an understanding of Greek Americans' long overdue history as a significant diaspora community within an American context.

Feature Films

The Journey: The Greek American Dream
available via the Internet, in English.

A work of compelling visual and audial power,..This is public history of high professional caliber, a product of collaboration between award-winning filmmaker Maria Iliou and historian Alexander Kitroeff. The film comprises fragments from a vast visual archive and draws upon contemporary ethnographic recollections to produce its version of the immigrant and ethnic past. Firmly anchored in conventions of historical interpretation, The Journey nevertheless offers no pretense of objective neutrality. The mere invocation of cultural mythologies in its subtitle enmeshes the work in ideology at the very moment of its circulation. In this capacity it inevitably alerts reviewers not to lose sight of its interest in values, urging, that is, critical dialogue with its cultural politics." --Yiorgos Anagnostou
Maria by Callas
Tom Volf's MARIA BY CALLAS is the first film to tell the life story of the legendary Greek/American opera singer completely in her own words.Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs—nearly all of which have never been shown to the public—the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.
Ludlow Greek Americans in the Colorado Coal War
available on Vimeo
The story of the Ludlow Massacre and the Ten Day War in 1914 Colorado with a special focus on the Greek strikers and their leader Louis Tikas.
Greek American Radicals: the Untold Story
Publication Date: 2013
available on Vimeo
"Focusing from the Great Depression to the demise of ethnic radicalism in the 50s, the documentary Greek-American Radicals: the Untold Story brings forth an alternative vision of Greek-American history that highlights the transformations and multiple interrelations between ethnicity, class and radicalism."

Journals & Magazines

Greek-American Review, 2001-2006, in Greek and English , is indexed and full text in Ethnic News Watch

National magazine of Greek American cultural and social interests. Begun in 1991, a fuller run of the publication, with limited searching, is available via this link

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, "Praised as "a magnificent scholarly journal" by Choice magazine, the only scholarly periodical to focus exclusively on modern Greece. The Journal publishes critical analyses of Greek social, cultural, and political affairs, covering the period from the late Byzantine Empire to the present," is indexed and full text in Project Muse

Greek Newspapers in English and Media & Publishing Outlets

Greek News/The Greek Reporter
Founded in 2008, The Greek Reporter shares news for the Greek diaspora around the world.
Modern Greek authors - books
Greece in Print
"the world's Greek literary connection"

Greek Cooking

Greek food is considered among the finest and most delicious in the world. It is healthy too, with an emphasis on simple fresh ingredients.

Greek Revival: Cooking for Life by Patricia Moore-Pastides
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2013
"An appetizing introduction to wonderful flavors and health benefits of the traditional Mediterranean diet. Patricia Moore-Pastides, an accomplished cook and public-health professional, presents dozens of easy-to-make and impossible-to-resist recipes that infuse a healthful diet with the enticement of great taste."
Secrets from the Greek kitchen: cooking, skill, and everyday life on an Aegean Island by David E. Sutton
Call Number: online
Publication Date: 2014
"Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks."

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