| Sumario: | Ludwik Krzywicki (1859-1941), a founding father of the social sciences in Poland, was one of the first European sociologists to visit the United States of America. His written impressions and observations were published in a little-known tome titled, Beyond the Atlantic (1895). Krzywicki's journey and book are introduced here from a trifold perspective. First, Krzywicki undertook his travels to observe modernity emerging in America, and to see how the future of Europe might possibly look. Second, the book constitutes a report of the firsthand field observations of a "modern" society by a social scientist who had previously studied "primitive" societies from the comfort of a library; thus it demonstrates how an "armchair ethnologist" became a fieldwork anthropologist. Third, Krzywicki analyzed changes in the attitudes and behavior of the Polish immigrants sometime after their coming to the United States; his observations on this topic were later confirmed by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in their classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.
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