Greek Americans (Napoleon's World)

Greek Americans refer to Americans of full or partial Greek descent, and are part of the broader Greek diaspora. They are largely identified by their speaking the Greek language, ancestry in the Aegean (either mainland Greece or in Turkey), and the Greek Orthodox Church. Greek Americans began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the late 1880s and came in particularly large waves of immigrants starting in the 1930s, with as many as 500,000 arriving in that decade alone. An additional boom in Greek immigration occurred during the 1950s and early 1960s due to religious and ethnic persecution in Turkey and the Balkans following the Black Sea War - this wave included many middle-class Greeks who had previously been part of the Ottoman elite. Estimates of the total number of Greek Americans figure around 6.5 million in the United States, the largest community outside of Greece proper. Major areas of settlement for Greek Americans include the Northeast Corridor (particularly Baltimore and Boston), Halifax, Yorktown, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Sahalee, and in recent years, Houston.