Gwiazda Zachodu = Western Star (Omaha, Neb.) 19??-1945
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,345 issues from 1918 to 1945, published in Omaha, Nebraska, digitised for Chronicling America.
Giving voice to the largest Polish community in the Great Plains region, the Gwiazda Zachodu, or “Western Star,” was an integral part of Omaha’s newspaper landscape from the opening decade of the twentieth century until the waning days of World War II. Founded in 1905, the paper published weekly on Fridays. The raison d’être of the Gwiazda Zachodu was clear from its beginning: passionate advocacy for the burgeoning Polish population of Omaha and the surrounding region.
Much of this passion can be attributed to early publisher Thomas Koziol. An immigrant from the south of Poland, Koziol came to America as a teenager and spent several years on farms in Nebraska before moving to Omaha and purchasing the Gwiazda Zachodu from founder W. J. Boruch. From 1908 to 1923 he leveraged the reach of his paper to advocate politically for his fellow Poles, before an accident at home resulted in his untimely death. In eulogizing him, the Gwiazda Zachodu boasted that Koziol’s influence among Omaha’s electorate was so strong that political candidates hostile to the Polish community could not be elected.
The early twentieth century saw a massive influx of Poles into Nebraska communities, and none more so than Omaha. By the 1930s the city featured a Polish community 10,000 strong centered around the South Omaha stockyards. The leadership of the Gwiazda Zachodu took it as its duty to educate readers about their new home, introducing a recurring Civic Catechism section in 1924 aimed at…
- Genres
- Westerns, News
- Published in
- Omaha, Nebraska, United States
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress