The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: A Classic Work in Immigration History.

By William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. Edited by Eli Zaretsky. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. xvii + 127 pp. $13.95.

The newest iteration of the pioneering sociological work on the turn-of-the-century Polish community in America is an abbreviation of the editor's previous one-volume edition of the classic five-volume work. The first one-volume edition, published in 1984, was a 310-page rendition which the editor explained as "freshly relevant to the central questions of social theory and history that concern us today."

The 1996 edition, running only 127 pages, preserved four sets of family letters, two family studies, and a very …