| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David A. Gerber. Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 422. $55.00.

David A. Gerber suggests that past studies of immigration have provided us with little in the way of a theoretical approach to examining the correspondence of individual immigrants. Such studies have tended to use letters primarily for quotations and information about the details of the immigrant experience. The other major approach to immigrant letters has been the edited collection. In this genre, editors frequently cut out what they considered was repetitive detail about everyday life and kinship networks, the very sorts of things that social historians today might well be interested in. Gerber seeks to remedy the situation. His study is divided into two distinct parts. The first provides an analytical examination of immigrant correspondence based on seventy-one collections, with only occasional examples from these to illustrate a point. The second provides a close examination of four collections of immigrant letters and is meant to illustrate the points made in the first.

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