Description
Book SynopsisIn the era before airplanes and e-mail, how did immigrants keep in touch with loved ones in their homelands, as well as preserve links? This book analyzes the cycle of correspondence between immigrants and their homelands, paying particular attention to the role played by letters in reformulating relationships made vulnerable by separation.
Trade ReviewAuthors of Their Lives is the definitive study of American and Canadian immigrant letters. David Gerber employs psychology, epistolary scholarship, as well as his superlative capacities as an empathetic reader, to reveal how letters constitute not only a record of immigrant experience, but were an agent in fashioning that experience. Authors of Their Lives is an invaluable contribution to transnational history at the most personal and persuasive level. -- John R. Gillis,author of Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World
David Gerber provides a new reading of the immigrant letter. Though informed by social theory, it is Gerber's astute analysis which provides the reader a rare entree to the psychology of particular immigrants. A unique achievement! -- Rudolph J. Vecoli,Professor of History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
This is a fascinating book. David Gerber carefully analyzes the letter itself to focus on the development of individual identities in the face of migration. -- Jon Gjerde,author of The Minds of the West: The Ethnocultural Evolution of the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917
[I]n this excellent study . . . Gerber uses sophisticated social theory quite elegantly for a readable and insightful analysis of the immigrants and what migration meant to them. . . . Gerber also breaks new ground by analyzing the ‘rhythm’ of letter writing how immigrants' writing changed over time and what that reveals about their psychology, emotion, and adjustment. . . . Altogether, Gerber provides a fresh model and another high standard for scholars of American immigration. * Journal of American History *
Gerber provides an insightful examination of the role letters play in the shaping of identity. . . . Will certainly help historians to address personal immigrant letters more critically. * American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Letters and Immigrants I Immigrant EpistolarityIntroduction 1 Traditions of Inquiry 2 Forming Selves in Letters 3 Writing with a Purpose: Immigrant Epistolarity and the Culture of Emigration 4 Using Postal Systems: Transnational Networks on the Edge of Modernity 5 Establishing Voice, Theme, and Rhythm 6 When Correspondence WanesII Four Lives in LettersIntroduction 7 Thomas Spencer Niblock: A Dialogue of Respectability and Failure 8 Catherine Grayston Bond: Letter-Writing as the Practice of Existential Accounting 9 Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald: Longing for Her "Little Isle" from a Farm in Central New York 10 Dr. Thomas Steel: The Dif?culties of Achieving the Reunited Family Abbreviations for Archives and Repositories Consulted Notes Collections of Letters ConsultedIndex About the Author
