You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A history of the Finnish people in Michigan published in English for the first time.
Documents consist of departmental memos and reports, correspondence with individuals, and press clippings and press reports which deal with American Jewish groups during 1942-1945, as well as issues relating to Palestine, Jews and Jewish refugees during World War II.
Historians have tended to point to John F. Kennedy's 1960 bid for the presidency as the first time a candidate relied extensively on public opinion polls to drive a campaign. Polling has come to define American politics, and is perhaps most clearly embodied in Bill Clinton, the post poll-driven president in history. Melvin G. Holli dismisses this notion, however, and reveals that presidential reliance on public opinion polls dates back to the New Deal Era, when Franklin Roosevelt employed a first-generation Finnish-American named Emil Hurja to conduct polls for this 1932 and 1936 presidential campaigns. Holli shows us how Hurja convinced the Democratic National Committee to allow him to apply the new science of polling FDR's presidential campaign of 1932. Roosevelt's triumph at the polls in that year and again in 1936, as well as the spectacular 1934 Democratic mid-term congressional victory was legendary. Holli restores Hurja to his rightful place in American history and politics, showing us that the Washington press corps were right on target when they dubbed Hurja the 'Wizard of Washington'.
"On Midsummer Eve, 1865, more than 30 Finnish and Sami immigrants disembarked from a Great Lakes ship to a place called Hancock, Michigan. At the time, Hancock consisted of nothing more than a small cluster of humble buildings, but it was here, on the outskirts of mid-19th-century civilization, that Finnish settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) took root. Much to the surprise of these new Americans, Midsummer was not a religious holiday marked by feasts in celebration of the season's prolonged sunlight. Rather, the newcomers were immediately hastened into the bowels of the earth to extract copper in pursuit of the American Dream. In short order, hardworking Finnish immigrants became reputable miners, lumberjacks, farmers, maids, and commercial fishermen. A century and a half later, the UP boasts the largest Finnish population outside of the motherland and sustains the determined spirit the Finns call sisu--an influence that remains palpable in all 15 UP counties."--