Of course, before that, Tadushi Kosciushko, a Polish aristocrat of Lithuanian descent in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation influenced by the Enlightenment, made great contributions to the establishment of the United States of America during the American War of Independence. (Tadushi Kosciushko traveled to and from Poland and spent the rest of his life fighting for the independence of the Polish-Lithuanian Federation and resisting Russian aggression. Since then, the United States has become an immigration destination for many Polish-Lithuanian political exiles and Poles and Lithuanians who do not want to be colonized by Russia.
With the reform of Russia in 186 1, the urbanization and industrialization of Poland-Lithuania, which was carved up by Russia, accelerated, and a large number of landless peasants left the land to make a living in cities, and a considerable number of them chose to cross the ocean to the new world. Because their education level is generally not high, most of them are engaged in heavy manual labor and low-tech jobs in the United States, with poor working conditions and low pay. Upton sinclair's masterpiece Slaughterhouse depicts the tragic experience of Lithuanian butchers at the bottom of Chicago society in the early 20th century.
However, with the economic development and social progress in the United States, the living conditions of Lithuanian immigrants in the United States have been continuously improved, and they have also participated more in American social life. One of the most obvious examples is that Lithuanian immigrants have widely participated in the popular basketball game in the United States and brought it back to the motherland to carry it forward.
Before and after World War II, in order to escape the persecution of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a large number of Lithuanians fled their motherland and came to the United States, including Marija Gimbutas, a famous anthropologist and an outstanding researcher of ancient European culture before the arrival of Indo-European languages, and czeslaw milosz, a Nobel Prize in Literature laureate and the greatest poet in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. aw Mi？ osz).
At an earlier time, many Jews had already set off from Villeno, the largest Jewish capital in Eastern Europe with a history of nearly 700 years, went to Europe and finally arrived in the New World. One of the most famous is Jascha Heifetz, the king of violin generation in the 20th century. Of course, unfortunately, most Jews in Villeno were massacred by Nazi Germans and some Lithuanians in World War II.
After the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania again and established the so-called "Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic", the United States never recognized the legitimacy of this occupation (together with other Baltic countries Latvia and Estonia). Until the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States recognized the legitimacy of Lithuania's government in exile and supported a series of social movements launched by Lithuanian people for national independence.
Today, there are over 650,000 Lithuanian citizens in the United States. In contrast, there are less than 3 million Lithuanians in Lithuania today. Lithuanian-Americans still play their due role in all walks of life in the United States. For example, maybe you have seen the sci-fi movie Back to the Future trilogy, and maybe you must have seen Forrest Gump. Their director is a Lithuanian from the former "slaughterhouse" slum in Chicago-Robert Zemeckis (the correct pronunciation should be Zemetzkis).