| The traditional Polish community in Chicago, an organization-rich ethnic settlement that developed in the years after the Civil War, reached maturity and almost complete institutional self-sufficiency before World War I. Polish Chicago, sometimes referred to as “Polonia,” has been shaped by at least three distinct immigration waves. The first and largest lasted from the 1850s to the early 1920s, and was driven primarily by economic and structural change in Poland. This immigration is often referred to as Za Ch?ebem (For Bread). Primarily a peasant migration, it drew first from the German Polish partition, and then from the Russian partition and Austrian Polish partition. Although restrictions during World War I and in the 1920s cut off this immigration, by 1930 Polish immigrants and their children had replaced Germans as the largest ethnic group in Chicago. A second wave brought hundreds of thousands of Poles, displaced by World War II and then by the Communist takeover of Poland. Reference |  |