The Polish and Polish-American Contribution To American Culture
Polish-Americans have influenced American culture in many ways. Most prominent among these is through the inclusion of traditional Polish cuisine such as pierogi, kielbasa, golabki. Some of these Polish foods were tweaked and reinvented in the new American environment such as Chicago's Maxwell Street Polish Sausage.
Polish Americans have also contributed to altering the physical landscape of the cities they have inhabited, erecting monuments to Polish-American heroes such as Kościuszko and Pulaski. Distinctive cultural phenomena such as Polish flats or the Polish Cathedral style of architecture became part and parcel of the areas where Polish settlement occurred.
Poles cultural ties to Roman Catholicism has also influenced the adoption of such distinctive rites like the blessing of the baskets before Easter in many areas of the United States by fellow Roman Catholics.
Read more about this topic: Polish American
Famous quotes containing the words polish, contribution, american and/or culture:
“The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.”
—Frances Trollope (17801863)
“If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writers contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.”
—Eric Bentley (b. 1916)
“Ive always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe its because many American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)