"Demetrios is Now Jimmy"

Book excerpt: This work explores the arrival of Greek immigrants to the southern urban areas, in the early 1900s, and their remarkably rapid adjustment and acculturation to life in the New South. The majority of these immigrants became modest entrepreneurs and achieved some economic prosperity, which was at the root of their successful settlement in the growing southern cities. Although there was no "melting pot," these newcomers swiftly adapted to the evolving American social, economic, and political tenets - as practiced in the South - even as they retained and adjusted their own deeply ingrained cultural and religious traditions.