Austrian Americans in the context of "Polish Americans"

White ethnic is a term used to refer to white Americans who are not Old Stock or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. They consist of a number of distinct groups and make up approximately 69.4% of the white population in the United States. The term usually refers to the descendants of immigrants from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, Ireland, the Caucasus and France/Francophone Canada. Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Russian Americans, Czech Americans and Slovak Americans, Hungarian Americans and Austrian Americans are considered white ethnic.

Otto Ludwig Preminger (/ˈprɛmɪndʒər/ PREM-in-jər; German: [ˈɔtoː ˈpreːmɪŋɐ] ; 5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austrian-American film and theatre director, film producer and actor. He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre, and was one of the most influential directors in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. He was nominated for three Academy Awards, twice for Best Director and once for Best Picture, among many other accolades.

After achieving theatrical prominence in Vienna, Preminger emigrated to the United States in the mid-1930s, working as a director for 20th Century Fox. He first gained attention for film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), while in the 1950s and 1960s, he directed high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these later films pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with themes which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as premarital sexuality (The Moon Is Blue, 1953), drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959) and homosexuality (Advise & Consent, 1962). He also had several acting roles, most famously as a Nazi POW camp commandant in Stalag 17.

Anti-Catholicism in the United States dates back to the colonial history of the U.S. Anti-Catholic attitudes were first brought to the Thirteen Colonies of British North America by Protestant settlers from Europe during the British colonization of the Americas. Two types of anti-Catholic rhetoric existed in colonial society and they continued to exist during the following centuries. The first type, derived from the theological heritage of the Protestant Reformation and the European wars of religion (16th–18th century), consisted of the biblical Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon variety and it dominated anti-Catholic thought until the late 17th century. The second type was a variety which was partially derived from xenophobic, ethnocentric, nativist, and racist sentiments and distrust of increasing waves of Catholic immigrants, particularly immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria and Mexico. It usually focused on the pope's control of bishops, priests, and deacons.

Historians have studied the motivations for American anti-Catholicism. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. characterized prejudice against Catholics as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people." John Higham described anti-Catholicism as "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history". Joseph G. Mannard says that wars reduced anti-Catholicism: "enough Catholics supported the War for Independence to erase many old myths about the inherently treasonable nature of Catholicism. ... During the Civil War, the heavy enlistments of Irish and Germans into the Union Army helped to dispel notions of immigrant and Catholic disloyalty."