Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures represents a cultural approach to understanding ethnic diversity in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Thirteen chapters, each using an ethnographic field methodology, explore such ethnic experience as the "invisible" (WASPS and African-Americans); "self-chosen" (Welsh-American, Irish-American, and Ukrainian-American); "gender-related" (the Lubovitcher); "religious" (Jewish, Native American, Greek-American, and Puerto Rican); and "dislocated" (Cambodians and the homeless). Ethnographic fieldwork focuses an insider's view on the meaning of ethnic experience in the lives of participants in the research. This volume examines the role and function of various ethnic endeavors in the preservation and maintenance of ethnic identity by contemporary Americans.

This five part volume includes:
 

Introduction: Ethnic Culture Analysis—A Course of Study, Jane C. Goodale and Philip L. Kilbride
 

Methodology, Elizabeth R. Ameisen and Carolyn G. Friedman

Part I. Black and WASP in American Cultural Experience: The Invisible Ones
 

Exclusivity in an Ethnic Elite: Racial Prejudice as Boundary Maintenance, Elizabeth R. Ameisen
 

Africans and African-Americans: An Ethnohistorical View and Symbolic Analysis of Food Habits, Carolyn G. Friedman

Part II. Self-Chosen Ethnicity

Unique Americans: The Welsh-American Ethnic Group in the Philadelphia Area, Lorraine Murray
 

Irish-Americans and Irish Dance: Self-Chosen Ethnicity, Erin McGauley Hebard
 

Art and Identity: Ukrainian-American Ethnicity, Jennifer Krier

Part III. Interpretations of Gender and Ethnicity: The Lubavitcher Experience
 

Equality Does Not Mean Sameness: The Role of Women within the Lubavitcher Marriage, Philip Baldinger
 

Strategies for Strength: Women and Personal Empowerment in Lubavitcher Hasidism, Gita Srinivasan

Part IV. Ethnicity and Religion: The Persistence of Collective Representations
 

Our Lives Revolve around the Holidays: Holidays in the Transmission of Jewish Ethnicity, Anna Dahlem
 

Fayetteville or Raleigh? An Analysis of an American Indian Baptist Church, Beth Batten
 

Issues in Greek Orthodoxy That Define and Maintain Greek-American Ethnicity, Karen L. Belsley
 

Es como si fuera la casa de uno: The Role of the Community Church in Maintaining Puerto Rican Ethnicity, Monica Schoch-Spana

Part V. Dislocation and Ethnicity

Cambodian Marriage: Marriage and How it is Changing among Cambodian Refugees in Philadelphia, Rebecca C. Popenoe
 

Ethnic Expression in a Jewish Street Person, Andrew Millstein

Conclusion, Philip L. Kilbride and Jane C. Goodale

In the 1920s and 1930s there were adventures to be lived and fortunes to be made by strong young men in the outback of Australia and the gold fields of New Guinea. This is the diary of five years spent in hot pursuit—not of honor and glory, but of excitement and riches—by one such adventurer, Michael "Mick" Leahy, his brothers Jim and Pat, and friends Mick Dwyer and Jim Taylor. Leahy and his associates explored the unknown interior of New Guinea, seeking gold and making contact for the first time with the aborigines of the interior mountains and valleys.

White man was unknown to these often cannibalistic, always dangerous, aborigines who thought the seekers of yellow in the streams slightly mad, and thus easy prey. The chronicles of their explorations and their hundreds of photographs brought news of these native peoples to the outside world. In doing so, they changed forever our understanding of the human landscape of New Guinea, and carved a place in history for these explorers who, braving the environment in search of gold, found people.