Reviewed by Jennifer Eastman Attebery | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 29.1

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Reviewed by Jennifer Eastman Attebery | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 29.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants.* Edited by Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. x + 315 pp. Photos, tables, illustrations, notes, and index. $69.95 (cloth or e-book).
Scholarship concerning migrant writings is often buried in language-specific journals. Pulling together work from a kaleidoscope of languages, Letters across Borders offers a multilingual view of one important genre, the migrant letter. Editors Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke also seek to offer a sampling of new interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon linguistics, narratology, psychology, and transnational studies. Doing so, the editors argue, moves the study of the immigrant letter beyond its earlier theoretical bases in sociology and social history.	1
Many of the articles use nineteenth-century materials to tackle important methodological issues that remain problematic for migration historians. Both Eric Richards's article and that of Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner consider whether letter collections are representative. Helbich and Kamphoefner model a statistical method, concluding that German collections overrepresent male and educated emigrants. Richards focuses on content, concluding that the corpus of Australian immigrant letters is best used in hypothesis-driven research.	. . .

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