Sponsored by a grant from The Cleveland Foundation, Daniel J. Homick was asked by Professor Michael S. Pap, then director of the John Carroll University Institute for Soviet and East European Studies, to write two chapters for this book: "The German Community in Cleveland" (28 pages) and the so-called "...Great Russian Community in Cleveland" (13 pages).

The term "Great Russians" was historically used by Russians in Cleveland to distinguish themselves from other Imperialist Russia nationalities that settled in the greater Cleveland area prior to the Russian Revolution. The term, "Great Russian" was retained here because the Soviet Union, like Tsarist Russia, was composed of many different nationalities, not just the Russians. The non-Russian nationalities and those from the USSR's East European satellite nations who found their way to Cleveland, Ohio are discussed in this book too. For example, Dr. Pap, a Ukrainian nationalists himself, edited chapters in this reference work on the Byelorussian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian communities in Cleveland. These immigrants were from the "captive nations" of the USSR.

Other major immigrant, racial and religious minority groups in Cleveland such as African-Americans, Greeks, Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Jews, Syrian-Lebanese and Yugoslavians (Slovenians, Croatians, Serbians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians), are also explored in this 353 page reference work that owes much to the pioneering work on the ethnic history of Cleveland to the respected columnist of The Cleveland Press, Theodore Andrica.