Ukrainian Americans

Ukraine is an Eastern European country often erroneously called “the Ukraine” in English. Formerly controlled by the Mongols, Lithuania, Poland, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and the Soviet Union, it is today an independent democracy and the second largest country on the European continent after Russia. It was [Page 2109]one of the founding republics of the Soviet Union in 1922 and regained its independence in 1991 after the fall of European communism.

As of the 2010 Census, there are 939,746 Ukrainian Americans, making this one of the largest Ukrainian communities in the world. Ukrainians are well distributed through the United States and tend to concentrate mainly in northern cities— New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, although Los Angeles also has a notable population of 34,000 Ukrainian Americans. Though a Ukrainian was among the settlers of the Jamestown colony in the early 17th century, sustained Ukrainian immigration did not begin until the 1880s. These early immigrants, arriving from the 1880s until the 1920s (when new immigration restrictions curtailed the number of immigrants arriving from eastern Europe), established the country's oldest Ukrainian American enclaves, especially in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. More recent immigration has been in response to the fall of the Soviet Union and has included a substantially greater number of Jewish Ukrainians than did the earlier wave.

The Harry F. Sinclair House is a mansion in Manhattan in New York City and houses the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA). It is open to the public and promotes art and literature by hosting exhibitions and other shows. The UIA is a nonprofit organization founded in 1948 to promote Ukrainian culture, history, art, music, and literature.

A number of George Washington's soldiers in the Revolutionary War were Ukrainian Americans, as were several Union soldiers in the Civil War. Thousands more served in World War II, after the community had become better established and larger. Ukrainian Americans have been politically active and have tended to be conservative, especially since the end of World War I; historically, Ukrainian Americans have supported the Republican Party despite usually being pro-labor. Throughout the years between World War I and World War II, Ukrainian Americans were [Page 2110]involved in political demonstrations against the occupation of Ukraine by Poland and the treatment of Ukraine by the Soviet Union.