Abstract
Hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to Pennsylvania from the 1880s through the First World War, and east-central European archives contain untold amounts of material documenting their experiences. Immigration historians have long researched in federal, state, and local records in the United States to tell migrants’ stories, but they have less often made use of overseas documents about those same communities and individuals. Both the Austrian State Archives in Vienna and the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest are troves of Pennsylvania history. Austro-Hungarian offi cials collected information on many facets of migrants’ American lives and organizations, from churches and benefi t societies to social clubs and newspapers. In addition, several different branches of the Austro-Hungarian government documented their own work in the United States to fi nancially assist migrant institutions, investigate industrial accidents and labor confl icts, and sometimes even monitor individuals politically at odds with the home government. European sources thus not only expand our evidence for examining familiar themes in Pennsylvania’s industrial history, but they also speak to less familiar topics that connect Pennsylvania migrants to broader transnational and European political questions of mobility, nationalism, and citizenship.