#seniorseminar: Jordan Tsigas and American Hellenics or Greeks in America? Divergent Views on Unity and Identity in Early Greek America

I came to Florida State University as a management information systems major. I took some history classes to meet graduation requirements. During Covid, I had a hard time with online classes, and when I realized that a number of the business courses would stay online even after we went back in person, I decided that this did not work for me. I need a class I can actively engage in, and so I switched to history as my major and took business analytics as my minor. History was my favorite topic in high school.

I like studying what I know about, so my favorite kinds of history are eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history – any time period! A few years ago, I took Dr. Palmer’s class on the early Middle Ages and wrote my term paper on the first Iconoclasm. I had a lot of fun with that.

This is my third attempt at completing the senior seminar. I tried once in my junior year with Dr. Stoltzfus in a class called “Crimes of the Powerful and Civil Resistance,” and once in what was supposed to be my senior year with Dr. Herrera on “Latinx History.” I realized that I had to really be interested in the senior seminar topic to succeed. I took Dr. Sinke’s seminar on “Family Ties in U.S. Immigration History” last fall, because I knew that my mother’s side of the family had kept a lot of their immigration records, and I thought that I could use some of the family documents – plus I had always wanted to research that history!

It took me a moment to work out the specific question I wanted to focus on. I wanted to research the 1920s and 30s, when my mom’s family came to the U.S. That’s what I had family documents for. I was also interested in finding out more about the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association that was set up in 1922 to help Greek immigrants with assimilation and citizenship issues.

Chain migration was the norm for Greek immigrants in the Midwest and northeast of the U.S. which allowed for viable hometown associations. On my grandfather’s side, 10% of his town in Greece came and settled in the Washington, D.C., area. On my grandmother’s side though, they settled in Staunton, Virginia, and there were no other people from their village in that town.

I was able to interview my grandmother about her immigration experience and our family history. There was one story that really stuck out to me – and became central to my paper. Attending a family gathering shortly after becoming engaged, my grandmother’s aunt questioned her about where her fiancé was from. When she said "Washington, D.C.," the aunt clarified where in the old country he was from. On being told his town, the aunt said, "He is a foreigner." She said that even though he was a fellow Greek. Her aunt was thinking in the mentality prevalent prior to immigration, when a person, even another Greek, from outside the natal town was considered to be a foreigner. This story brought home to me that our modern notion of a Greek-American identity has not always been the same. This led me to focus my research on the construction of Greek-American identity in the 1920s and 30s.

Getting started with the project was easy as I knew what primary sources I was going to use. What proved more of a challenge was connecting those primary sources to the secondary literature. I investigated all the organizations that my family belonged to. A lot of the family documents consisted of photos from events that they had participated in. They had pictures of them being involved in hometown associations, and I worked on the literature that dealt with immigrants and hometown associations, both generally and specifically for Greeks. I compared the stories that the family photos told from the 1920s and 30s with what the secondary literature was saying.

Parallel to that, I also worked on what AHEPA was advocating at the same time. These two tracks of research led me to my overall argument about identity and Greek immigrant associations, local and national, and the different aims that they were pursuing. For AHEPA, a national association, it was important that Greek immigrants took on an American identity, that all considered themselves American first while also sharing the Hellenic heritage of classical learning. Hometown associations were local and concerned with preserving the traditions of the places from which the Greek immigrants had come. It seemed that immigrants were encouraged to cultivate two different sets of identity at the same time.

Besides family documents, I used an online database called the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey which consists of translations of foreign-language newspapers of 22 different foreign language groups in the Chicago area from 1861 to 1938. I reviewed the Greek-language articles and found quite a few that had been written by AHEPA on the question of identity and assimilation. Another source was a surprise find on a visit home: an AHEPA 50-year anniversary publication from the 1970s. That told me about their original aims and how close those were aligned with U.S. immigration policy at the time. The book spoke about the overriding aim of assimilation.

In order to stay on top of my workload, I set goals for myself every week. I divided the writing process into small sections and tried to dedicate at least four days each week to it. Having these distinct sections to work on made it much more feasible to complete the whole thesis, and it was easy to edit, revise and sometimes reorganize the different segments. We had to submit some work every week which forced me to stay on track. Dr. Sinke had us develop a seed paper quite early on, which was a kind of very detailed outline. That helped me keep the structure of my paper in front of me and allowed me to slot all the different sections in where they belonged.

Key for me staying on top of the actual writing was having an effective filing system for all my notes and drafts. In the beginning I worked with Notion to organize all my notes and my ideas. When it came to writing, I switched over to Google drive to hold the drafts and comments on the drafts.

Presenting my work in class was not that challenging, but putting the presentation together was! I began to second-guess myself as to whether I had done enough research. And I did identify a couple of areas where I had to do more work. Presenting made me review my project and clarified my arguments.

On the whole, doing the research and writing the paper was a positive experience, but there were moments when it got quite stressful. My relationship to research is a bit complex: I enjoy doing it, but when I am not, I keep thinking about it, and it occupies a large part of my mind – which then makes it stressful. What helps me deal with the stressful aspects is to step back or away for a moment, to go for a walk and get a different perspective.

My advice to other students about to take a senior seminar is to make sure you divide your research and writing into small pieces. That’s what helped me enormously. When I attempted the senior seminar before, I did not do that. Once I did a lot of work in the beginning and then nothing for a couple of months, the second time it was the reverse. I left things far too late in the semester. This time I spaced it out and did something every week and I succeeded!