Professor Thaddeus Radzilowski

October 2006

Poles in the American Labor Movement

class=”figure” />Dr. Thaddeus Radzilowski is the President and
co-founder of the Piast
Institute: An Institute for
Polish and Polish American Affairs and visiting Research Professor at
the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He is President Emeritus of Saint
Mary’s College of Ave Maria University in Orchard Lake, Michigan. He is
a historian who holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of
Michigan. During his career he has taught at Madonna University,
Heidelberg College and Southwest Minnesota State University in
Minnesota. At Southwest Minnesota State he served as Chair of the
Department of History, Director of the Regional History Center, Director
of Rural Studies and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. He
has also been the Special Assistant to the Chair of the National
Endowment for the Humanities and NEH’s liaison to Ethnic and Community
groups in the United States (1981-1982) and the Acting Director of the
Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota
(1985-1986). In addition, he served as Director (1989-1991) of a two
year NEH funded Institute to create materials on local history for
inclusion in elementary and secondary school curricula. The results of
that Institute, titled The Heritage of the Prairie (1994) have been
published under his editorship. He was named Professor Emeritus of
History at Southwest Minnesota State University in 1997.

Dr. Radzilowski has written extensively on the history of Russia and
East Central Europe and migration from East Central Europe with special
emphasis on social history and historiography. A particular focus of his
work has been the history of Polonia and its formation. He has published
more than 100 monographs, edited collections, journal articles, book
chapters and scholarly papers. His work on Eastern Europe has included
articles on the ethnic and national groups in the region including a
four-part series on the Jewish experience in the Polish Lithuanian
Commonwealth and modern Poland. His monographs include Feudalism,
Revolution and the Meaning of Russian History (1994), and The Polish
Presence in Detroit (2001).

Dr Radzilowski has written, produced and consulted on a number of radio
and television productions and films including two award winning PBS
films Out of Solidarity: Three Polish Families in America (1986) and
Dealers among Dealers (1995) with Gaylen Ross. The first was on the
adaptation of Solidarity exiles to American life and the second dealt
with the different Jewish cultures of New York’s Diamond District. He
also served as Historical Advisor to the A&E Reports program on the
A&E Cable network. Dr. Radzilowski is a member of the editorial Board of
the Polish Review and has been a consultant for the Department of
Education in the State of New Jersey and a number of municipalities and
school districts in Minnesota on ethnicity and pluralism. He has also
served as an advisor and consultant to the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights and the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Dr. Radzilowski has lectured widely in Europe, Canada and the United
States. In 1991 and 1992 he co-directed a special program on
International Business and the new situation in East Central and Central
Europe at the Wirtschaft Universitet in Vienna for the Minnesota State
University System. He also chaired an International Conference on
Migration at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland in 1986.
After 1990, Dr. Radzilowski consulted with a number of American
companies including Cummings Diesel-Europe, on doing business in East
and East Central Europe in the post-Comminist era.