Book excerpt: Through a consideration of settlement patterns, economic activity, language use, and cultural and religious institutions, The Welsh in Metro America: Respectability and Assimilation in San Francisco, Seattle, Columbus, and Milwaukee, 1870–1930 provides a micro study of four Welsh immigrant communities in urban America. This book endeavors to understand the strength and long-term viability of these communities and the ways in which they changed by analyzing the forces that enabled Welsh immigrants and their children to so rapidly become Welsh Americans and, ultimately, to almost seamlessly enter the mainstream world of white, English-speaking, Protestant America.