In a research paper delivered at the Polish Studies Center (Indiana University) on April 25, 1997 by History graduate student Timothy Borden, The Challenge of Doing an Ethnic Labor History: Antoni A. Paryski's "Ameryka-Echo" and Toledo's Polonia, Borden argues that the scholarly challenge now goes beyond the assimilation and acculturation models of ethnicity that continue to dominate the field of American labor history. Instead of viewing ethnic workers through their affiliation with dominant American institutions, namely labor unions, Borden has investigated the debates over cultural and social constructions of ethnicity within one American Polish community itself.

Antoni A. Paryski's newspaper Ameryka-Echo presents an especially useful way of discovering and recovering these debates and the meaning they held for Poles and Polish-Americans. In particular, the Echo's coverage of one of Toledo's most bloody and divisive strikes, the Willys-Overland Strike of 1919, reveals that ethnicity was a conceptual flash-point in the contestation of issues such as unionization, political pluralism, and civil society. As Paryski attempted to define strike supporters outside the limits of what constitued the Polish community, he demonstrated that ethnic identity held profound implications for power relations not only within Polonia, but between it and the larger society as well.

http://www.indiana.edu/~polishst/news/news19_1/news19_3.html