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Forming A Transnational Narrative: New Perspectives on European Migrations to the United States

David A. Gerber
SUNY Buffalo


NEW CONCEPTUAL MODELS for understanding international migration to the United States are currently entering our historiography. One pertains to the role of race in a structuring of political rights and social and economic opportunity that assisted in the incorporation of white Europeans, while depressing the social position of Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Latinos. 1 The other, which is the subject of this essay, stresses the transnational experiences of international migrants. Resisting the logic of the conventional categories of analysis—immigration, emigration, assimilation, acculturation, etc.—transnationalism posits the existence of modes of understanding and of behavior that span homelands and destinations and defy conventional time and space, especially national boundaries. American immigration historians have been slow to adopt transnational conceptual models to analyze the general outlines of international migration and its consequences. 2 Transnationalism has largely been employed not by historians, but by contemporary behavioral scientists who have been almost exclusively involved in analysis of the late twentieth century migrations of non-European peoples to the United States. These analysts have often proceeded on the premise that transnationalism is a recent phenomenon which has only been made possible by jet travel and instantaneous electronic communications that facilitate on-going contacts between migrants and their homelands. They go further, however, in joining transnationalism to an understanding of the role of race in determining the destinies of today's international migrants. Race, it is claimed, separates the experience of the Europeans of the past from the non-Europeans of today. The whiteness of the Europeans allowed them to settle comfortably in the United States, with full access to rights and to opportunities. Thus, the Europeans are properly understood within the frameworks of assimilation models. The future of today's non-Europeans, in contrast, is said to be tentative, because as non-whites they may never be allowed to assimilate into American life on terms of equality, and may find it necessary and attractive to go back and forth to their homelands and ultimately re-emigrate. For these analysts, transnationalism fills the conceptual void produced by the irrelevance of past theory to contemporary migrations. 3 1
     The purpose of this essay 4 is to demonstrate the relevance of transnationalism to understanding historical European international migrations to the United States. I attempt to do this in two ways. First, through analysis and critique of the historical literature, including my own past work, this essay demonstrates the ways in which a transnational framework might fill certain gaps in European immigration historiography. Second, the essay develops an example—letter-writing—of transnational activities in which migrants engaged during the nineteenth century, a part of the classic era of European immigration. It is my hope that readers will find in these discussions new frameworks that will deepen their understanding of international migration, and beyond that, of the similarity of international migration waves over time. The assumption of much of the research on today's international migrations is that these migrations and those of the historical past are so different in character that they cannot be understood using the same conceptual apparatus that historians have employed to study European migrations. There are indeed many differences, but, as Nancy Foner has ably demonstrated in a recent book, those differences are easily exaggerated. 5 I would go further to make a claim for the unity of American immigration history and historiography: not only do the three great migration waves of American history have much in common, but they can be productively studied using the same conceptual tools. By linking contemporary and historical migrations conceptually, and by finding unities in the experiences of old and new Americans, we may enrich the teaching of American history. 2
     I begin by examining my own experience with the changing historiography of the field. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I believed that a master narrative of ethnic pluralism was emerging from the literature of the social history of mid-nineteenth century American immigration and its multiple contexts, and I came to contribute to advancing it. The center of this master narrative was a variation on the familiar immigrant paradigm, by which I mean the narrative of the path of the immigrants, via the ethnic group, to becoming ethnic Americans. In following this path they were not only transforming themselves, but were simultaneously widening the mainstream of American politics, society, and culture.6 3
     Applied to the particular context of the 1850s, a decade which was of great interest to me at one point in my work in immigration history, this narrative presented the story of masses of British, Irish, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and others embarking on the conjoined paths of Americanization and ethnicization. While each of these peoples appeared to begin its transformation from within the space of its own culture, memory, and history, the direction of their stories was largely determined not in the Old World, but in the new one, and involved paths that merged and hence broadened. The process seemed guided by a number of factors: the assumed finality of permanent separation in the era of sailing ships and the arduous and generally dreaded two-month journey across the ocean; the rapid growth of the demand for labor and of economic opportunity with the opening of Western lands, the Market Revolution and the first waves of industrialization; and politicization and ethnicization, resulting from the encounters with both class exploitation and nativism and from a positioning on ethnocultural and sectional issues. All of these impelled immigrants toward American public life and American identity.7 4
     For other periods of time, most prominently the second mass immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial eras, there have been analogous historiographical developments. Labor and immigration histories have merged, for example, in work that has demonstrated the rise of a multiethnic industrial labor movement, which posed its own formulations of democracy and pluralism to counter both nativism and laissez faire capitalism, and which ultimately entered Franklin Roosevelt's social democratic New Deal Coalition.8 Whatever the period of time, immigration thus conceived was the closing of one door and the opening of another. But there was room in this conceptualization nonetheless for the immigrants to embrace their own transported, useful traditions, to construct unique identities, and to work out their destinies on their own terms rather than terms imposed on them by the native-born elites. 5
     This seemed a dramatic, compelling narrative. I certainly thought so when I made it the basis of The Making of An American Pluralism, my study of Buffalo in the era of the first mass immigration before the American Civil War. What I appreciated most about it was its advance over the unilinear and mechanistic explanatory schemes that had seen immigrants, bewildered and defensive, pushed by the overwhelming pressures of modernization and opportunity and by the self-evident superiority of the American way of life toward rapid assimilation. This lock-step march toward the American mainstream of these older explanatory schemes seemed to deny the immigrants the continuity on which personal identity depends, and thus seemed premised on an unrealistic psychology. It also denied the immigrants the cultural creativity and vitality I had seen in my own immigrant family, in which European and American ways blended in astonishing and unpredictable ways. The generations were not alienated from each other, and a healthy skepticism about American life blocked any temptation to deny who we were and to flee into the mainstream, even as we prospered, left the factories, and became conventionally and respectably middle class. For many immigration historians, our family experiences thus informed the new interpretive emphases on immigrants' agency and cultural creativity. 6
     Under the influence of this emergent, late twentieth century conceptualization, the reigning mid-century synthesis of immigration history, Oscar Handlin's brilliant The Uprooted, a gloomy narrative of powerlessness and defeat, and the assimilationist theories of mid-century behavioral science, with their assumption of processes that could not be resisted nor changed, gave way to the much more complex and ultimately upbeat histories done in the last quarter of the twentieth century by the New Social Historians.9 John Bodnar's The Transplanted, the reigning synthesis of late twentieth century immigration history, stands as a monument to the merger of immigration history and the New Social History.10 The logic of Bodnar's argument is closely dictated by the desire to refute Handlin. Bodnar's is a study of immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial era, but it employs assumptions and concepts that are also being employed by historians of mid-nineteenth century European migrations. He places the immigrant's agency, creativity and practical, calculating common sense at the center of the narrative. 7
     An interpretation such as Bodnar's imparts dignity to the previously voiceless ancestors of the third and fourth generation immigration historians, like Bodnar himself, who were then writing the history of their ethnic kinfolk, and this certainly made it attractive to many researchers. But there was yet a wider interpretive context, beyond these predilections, in which the New Social History literature synthesized by Bodnar was appreciated and became authoritative. Like so much of the history largely inspired by the political movements of the 1960s, this immigration history often spoke to a hunger for positive, transhistorical meanings for both individual and national experiences. It merged the genealogies of the American people—individuals, families, parishes, neighborhoods, etc.—with the evolution of the American nation. It conceived of the nation emerging, through struggle and conflict, whether over slavery or later the rights of industrial workers, as an increasingly self-confident cultural and political democracy. Casting one's argument within it, as I did in The Making of American Pluralism, fuses the historian's project with the search for meanings of the American experience that are pluralist (in their inclusiveness) and democratic, and hence inspirational. It may come as a shock to those who think of the political culture inspired by the New Left of the 1960s as hypercritical and negativist to find that the history it inspired was not only hopeful, but even guardedly patriotic. Nonetheless, the search for alternative and forgotten democratic traditions led many young historians of that time, even in the midst of the Vietnam War, to a tentative embrace of the possibilities of American life. 8
     Whatever might be said in praise of its larger democratic purposes, however, in retrospect much of the effort to infuse the American past with transhistorical democratic and pluralist meanings now increasingly seems naive and tendentious to me. Indeed, in the more extreme formulations that bent history to ideological purposes, it appears ironically to mirror on the Left its principal adversary, the conservative consensus history of the 1950s. Like consensus history, it denied moral and political complexity. I believe these effects are now well-understood. The increasing emphasis on race that has recently come to pervade American historiography, including immigration historiography, forms a corrective to the claims that have been made for the inclusiveness of American pluralism.11 It reminds us of the abiding divisions that have inhibited the development of consensus on the terms of inclusion and of the protean character of racism in American life. 9
     The principal limitation of the democratic pluralist synthesis inspired by the New Social History for the narrative of immigration history now seems to me to be fairly transparent: it advances an intentionality—indeed a teleology—to the historical process, and the actors engaged in it, that neither logic nor evidence can sustain. International migrants of the classic era of European migration were no more engaged in a pilgrimage in search of salvation on American terms than were voluntary immigrants of any other era. They were searching for the sort of opportunity and security that modernizing processes were increasingly denying them in Europe. In the effort to attain private, individual and family goals, however, they met with larger circumstances that involved them in a variety of public spheres, from institution-building to party politics. These, in turn, brought about collective mobilizations that inspired ethnicization (group and identity formation). Ethnicization and politicization moved these immigrats, with various degrees of intentionality and reluctance, toward Americanization. Too often, however, we have mistaken the aims of a narrow minority of ethnic leaders who pioneered in the work of ethnicization for the goals of ordinary folk. We have then inferred the consciousness of ordinary folk from the group goals conceived by these ethnic elites. 10
     Whatever the degree of intentionality on the part of the actors, the lives of the masses of immigrants and the life of the nation did merge. But we need also to remember that European immigrants remained conscious of their homelands and their individual and family pasts, and that this consciousness remained a vital feature of immigrant life. Although dismissed too easily as the territory of memory and nostalgia, the land of backward looking homesickness, I will offer instead in what follows a defense of this transnational territory. It was not frozen in time, but rather a work of construction and continuing development. I will show that to build homeland connections was a significant part of the creative, existential tasks facing immigrants. 11
     How has this dimension fared in past immigration history? As a major theme of migrant life, transnationalism has not been significantly explored in our immigration history. We do have many monographs on migrant re-emigration and resettlement in Europe and on immigrant participation in homeland politics.12 But this literature has been compartmentalized to the extent that it has not influenced the larger narrative of immigration history, to which, as we see in Bodnar's The Transplanted, it is largely conceived as merely incidental. "As the name immigration history suggests, the field has largely been conceived in terms of resettlement, readjustment, assimilation, and acculturation. It traces, as I have said, the closing of one door and the opening of another. 12
     There is, however, an alternative interpretive tradition, the transnational implications of which have never been fully addressed. It is associated with Frank Thistlethwaite, a British economic historian, whose powerful and explicit analytical statement four decades ago signaled an important challenge to the reigning assimilationist assumptions. Thistlethwaite explicitly rejected Americocentric immigration history, and offered in its place an emphasis on the ways in which job markets in both Europe and numerous destinations structured a wide variety of leave-takings, resettlements, and re-migrations. Specific destinations receded in importance in Thistlethwaite's history before the force of practical ambitions achieved in multiple and very different places and frequent comings and goings across oceans. When unemployed agricultural workers, looking for seasonal work, chose Chile or Argentina as a temporary destination rather than the United States, the claim that the United States was a special haven for he oppressed and of American citizenship to be a singular goal quickly receded13 13
     But while rejecting the assimilationist model, this alternative view, which is largely focused on emigration, was not necessarily embedded in a particularly complex view of migrant aspirations or migration itself. Take, for example, its dependence on the concept of chain migration, by which is meant the process by which pioneering migrants become established in a new society, and then encourage and subsidize the migration of related individuals, who in turn do the same for others, and thus forge a chain of activity. By replacing the view of migration as chaotic and unstructured, it was a breakthrough in our conception of international migration. But its linear and serial understanding of leave-taking creates the impression of a chain of individuals gradually working its way toward the last link and then disappearing. Then, it is implied, homeland ties appear ended, and the door is closed on the past. 14
     More accurate, however, is the concept of group networks of family, kin and friends that function in a variety of ways not only to support migration, but also to maintain homeland ties by providing abiding avenues of transnational personal and social communication, often over the course of many decades and intergenerationally.14 Had Europe completely emptied of people, we would not expect this. That, of course, is not what happened. Families and friendships remained, separated in time and space by oceans and national borders, but very much alive and capable of growth and change. Personal identity depended on the continuity of relationships that maintenance of these ties made possible. In the light of this understanding, I propose that we need to expand our conception of international migration beyond our understandings of emigration and immigration to encompass the transnational dimension. It is often hidden, because it involves in its most common forms personal relations in relatively small, if sustainable and durable, networks. If we conceive of the purposes of the history of international migration in terms of gathering data on massive cohorts of population or of job structures, or the study of the public life of ethnic groups, it is easily overlooked. 15
     To demonstrate what I have in mind, I intend not to dwell on what we already know from existing literature (for example, repetitive labor migrations; and political activity) about the transnationalism of nineteenth and early twentieth century European international migrants. Instead I attempt to recast very familiar aspects of the history of those migrants into transnational terms that have yet to be employed to understand them. The phenomenon I have in mind is personal correspondence, the ordinary exchange of letters, and the acts of reading and writing associated with this exchange between migrants and the families and friends they left behind. 16
     A brief word about letters as a source is necessary. The interest in immigrant letters is hardly new in immigration historiography and in the behavioral sciences. Immigrant letters constitute probably the largest single archive we possess of the writings of ordinary people, and historians and other analysts have long recognized that they may provide unique insights, from the bottom up, into the mind and experience of immigrants. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki made extensive use of these letters in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, as did such early social historians of American immigration as George Stephenson and Theodore Blegen. Our use of them, however, as I have argued elsewhere, has been restricted by at least two interpretive problems. First, we immigration historians have lacked the ability to socially and psychologically contextualize the acts of reading, writing, and posting personal letters. Second, we have lacked methodologies that would enable us to treat letters as texts with their own specific conventions and codes, as opposed to sources in which we can find facts that prove generalizations we have already derived from other sources. Both of these difficulties can now be overcome, because of the great variety of new knowledge associated with the linguistic turn in cultural history, with discourse theory, and with post-behaviorist social science. We can now read personal letters for their insights into the writers as individuals, formulate understandings of the relationships and communities formed by the exchanges of letters, and appreciate the meanings attached to getting and receiving mail in the historical past.15 17
     We may begin by thinking of long-term personal correspondence—and I have in mind here not the occasional, random letter, but the letter-series—as a space mutually crafted over time by correspondents. Such letters break down conventional boundaries of place and create an alternate time dimension. They establish their own chronology of sending and receiving by which an epistolary relationship is charted and, through narration, they project the past into the present and future. The immigrant letter then is a type of early transnational social field, in other words, a site for the organization of various ordinary social activities. 16 It lifted people out of conventional time-space and rendered the national and natural boundaries that separated them insignificant, at least in so far as the letter rendered physical and political borders powerless to create impediments for sustaining mutually desired relationships. 18
     Letters simultaneously weave their own webs of meaning and relationship. Over the course of many years, immigrants and homeland recipients and senders, who were mostly close family but also friends and related kin, used correspondence to reformulate relationships rendered vulnerable by separation, and placed them on new planes of understanding. A great deal of immigrant personal correspondence is about renegotiating relationships. Here I have in mind writing by both parties engaged in the epistolary relationship about how often letters would be exchanged, what will and will not be written about, and whether letters can or cannot be shared with others or read publicly within the community.17 The letter was also the site of negotiation about the future of separation itself, for it was here that the often protracted and always emotionally charged discussion of long-term separation or family reconstitution, on either side of the ocean, was discussed. No less in the age of sailing craft than the later age of steam, people asked if migrants would return home or accept permanent resettlement, or if friends, kin, or family from the homeland would themselves emigrate and be reunited with those who had previously left. These questions were often intensively discussed over the course of years. Letters to individuals were also ways of keeping in contact indirectly with others, whether in the same family, or more distant kin and friends, with whom the writer did not correspond, and thus indirectly renegotiated these relationships and extended further the scope of the transnational social field. 19
     Personal correspondence had consequences, too, for identities on both sides of the ocean. In enabling the international migrant to continue to roam psychologically in the living past, the letter was the site for the development of that consciousness of in-betweeness. This fusing and mixing is today celebrated by the transnationalist social scientists, post-colonial deconstructionist literary scholars, and novelists like Salman Rushdie.18 Letters, of course, served to reaffirm Old World ties and the identification with the homeland and the writer's place within it. Immigrants, in their correspondence, often spoke of being transported out of time and place to their past homes by the processes of reading and writing letters. Some came to crave that sensation, sometimes expressed as a feeling of almost physical intimacy. It assisted in providing temporary respite from the disruptive consequences of migration and provided the sense of continuity on which personal identity depends. But such emotional needs aside, the letters usually proceeded to discuss quite practical aspects of the immigrants' lives-in-the-making in the United States. In such letters, both selves came together to dialogue with one another and with the person addressed. In providing this opportunity, the letter served as a site for the ongoing construction of personal identity.19 20
     The migrant was probably not alone in being transported and transformed by the writing of letters that crossed boundaries and vast spaces to reach their destinations. While we know about such influences of immigrant letters on homeland communities as stimulating or retarding migration, 20 we hardly know anything about the impact that participating in these epistolary exchanges had on the consciousness and identities of those who remained in the homeland. Perhaps they absorbed simultaneously a more acute sense of their own locality and of an increasingly knowable, wider world. The large majority of archived collections of immigrant letters are just that—letters sent by migrants—and thus are a one-way conversation. Homeland correspondents usually form an echo we faintly detect in the voice of the migrant's letter. But certainly we need to inquire about the impact of participation in this transnational social field on both sides of the ocean. 21
     These letters were not only about the maintenance and transformation of personal relationships and the formation of complex identities. They were also the space in which a number of practical aspects of the transnational social field were given form in the mid-nineteenth century. One of their most significant practical and common functions was orchestrating the exchange of resources between the parties across space and borders. Remittances sent from the host society and subsidies sent from the homeland sometimes went to their recipients through personal couriers, but more often than not small amounts of money or bank drafts were sent along with the letter itself. When money transfers were arranged through banks, forwarding agencies, and freight shippers, as was increasingly common, it was in the letter that instructions were given about the process by which the money could be retrieved by the recipient. The letter also served as the site for arranging the sending of small parcels of goods that might increase income. This petty transnational commerce in goods such as watches and clocks, yarn, string, or seeds was accompanied by a discussion of the market that existed for such items. These discussions highlight the fact that the letter also served as a mechanism for the exchange of social intelligence between senders and recipients. The discussion of commodity and consumer food prices and of labor markets was ever-present in letters from both sides of the ocean. Correspondents also sent newspapers to one another, an exchange frequently mentioned in letters, and this, too, furthered the creation of a specifically transnational discourse about events in both societies, seen simultaneously from multiple perspectives, located in the letters. 22
     Thus far, I have only discussed the possibility of rethinking the meanings of the correspondence of migrants and homeland residents by placing immigrants' letters in a transnational perspective. I have been calling into question the marginalization of homeland ties from the immigrant's narrative. Homeland ties were not frozen in time, but part of a dynamic process of the joining together of peoples in a new, mutually crafted and evolving epistolary relationship. But the discussion may be extended beyond this insight to understand some unanticipated personal consequences of the exchange of letters. Here, I have in mind analysis of the ways in which getting and sending mail and using postal systems deepens our understanding of the immigrant's experience of modernity. Negotiating the international exchange of mail meant meeting the requirements of an impersonal, bureaucratic system, as is evidenced by the extent to which the correspondents themselves, in contrast to contemporary letter-writers, often seem to be anxiously preoccupied with the intricacies of paying for and posting letters. 23
     Transnational social fields are sites in which people, in the past as now, encountered and negotiated those central aspects of modernity—disembedding and distanciation—that Anthony Giddens has identified as central to the experience of modernity. 21 Distanciation is the spreading out of social relations across space and time, and disembedding is the lifting out of such relations from their local contexts, as social relations come to depend on our acting in line with rules laid down by impersonal and centralized, bureaucratically organized expert systems and on symbolic tokens for their maintenance. Both distanciation and disembedding are deterritorializing, for the relatively unique place, as a bounded locality, is rendered both less bounded and less unique. We are able to make sense of Giddens's argument when it comes to such contemporary phenomena as credit cards, internet shopping and ATM machines. But for an earlier time, especially the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, getting and sending mail may provide a parallel and transnational case of the experience of modernity. The movements across the ocean of the immigrants of that period took place, not coincidentally, at the same time as extensive, routinized European and North American postal systems were being established and linked together for the first time. 22 The postal system is an expert system to which one trusts, in the case of a personal letter, a valued possession that is a part of oneself and a part of the recipient who receives it. 24
     During much of the nineteenth century, when collection boxes and home delivery were rare, correspondents came directly in contact at the post office with the system's most local representative, who mediated between that system and the individual.23 But, as is still the case, there was no way to ensure that a letter ultimately reached its destination other than to trust in the efficacy of rules laid down by unseen, distant, and impersonal authorities. Patrons of postal systems had to learn to negotiate their actions by rules these authorities set. During the course of the nineteenth century, the international mails increasingly adopted regulations by which the size and weight of items placed in the mails became central to the knowledge required to get a letter to its destination. Methods of payment shifted, too, so that at one time payment could be made at both the sending and receiving ends, but then stamps, the most common of symbolic tokens alongside coins and paper money, were gradually introduced.24 If individuals were to answer letters in timely fashion, moreover, they needed to learn about inland and transoceanic transportation schedules, which might be subject to seasonal variations. Getting and sending mail was, on reflection, not as simple a task as it might appear. The maintenance of personal relations, a deeply conservative impulse, through use of the mails forced international migrants to become pioneers on the edge of transnational modernity. International migration prompted not only an expanding knowledge of the increasingly widening world, but also of the new systems that organized that world. 25
     These nineteenth century international migrants were not self-conscious modernizers.25 Resistance to facing the full force of the modernizing transformations that accompanied early industrial capitalism and undermined their security was a principal context of their migration. But such qualifications do not lessen the importance of the implications of their experience along the edge of modernity for our understanding of the European international migrant in the classic era of American immigration. While simultaneously looking backward and forward, these transnational migrants created liminal experiential sites, which creatively faced the changing circumstances of daily life. 26


Notes

1 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Witness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of A Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

2 A situation that prompted Donna Gabaccia's recent plea for comparative and transnational studies of emigration; see her essay, "Liberty, Coercion and the Making of Immigration Historians," Journal of American History, 84 (September 1997), 570-5. Similar calls for comparative and transnational work outside immigration history and in the more general analysis of the American past are found in, Ian Tyrell, "American Exceptionalism in An Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (October, 1991), 1031-55; and "The National and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History--A Special Issue," Journal of American History, 86 (December, 1999).

3 Central works of transnational theory are: Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Christina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 645 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, (Amsterdam: Jordon and Breach, 1994); Michael Peter Smith and Louis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, New Jersey; Transaction Publishers, 1998); Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt, "Transnational Communities," eds., special issue, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (March, 1999).

4 Portions of this essay were presented as "Forming A Transnational Narrative: Nineteenth Century International Migrants and the Purpose of Immigrant Personal Correspondence," at the meeting of the American Historical Association, January, 2001. Other portions (on the meanings of letters and using postal systems) of this essay parallel my argument in "Theories and Lives: Transnationalism and the Conceptualization of International Migrations to the United States," IMIS-Beiträge, #15 (December, 2000), 31-54, the publication of Institut für Migrations Forschung and Interkulturelle Studien, Osnalorück, Germany.

5 Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), which includes a chapter, "Transnational Ties," examining the relevance of transnationalism to historical European immigrations to New York City.

6 Though we do not share precisely the same view of what constitutes "the immigrant paradigm," nor what its meanings are in the context of American's search for a national identity, Donna R. Gabaccia's views are instructive; see, "Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and The Immigrant Paradigm of United States History," Journal of American History, 86 (December, 1999), 1115-1134. Gabaccia believes that recent work in the field, inspired by the New Social History, has challenged the immigrant paradigm by advancing ethnicization as an alternative to assimilation. My own view is that the literature demonstrates that ethnicization and integration, especially civic integration, are intersecting and mutually reinforcing processes. In turn, integration of immigrants as members of ethnic groups would seem logically to have significant implications for assimilation of individuals, through assimilation into a society widened by the immigrants' presence and agency. I do not believe the relations between integration of ethnic groups and assimilation of ethnic individuals have been adequately explored in the New Social History, which has neglected assimilation.

7 David A. Gerber, The Making of An American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1925-1860 (Urbania: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1945-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and from a different interpretative direction, the ethnocultural interpretation of politics, rather than social history, for example, Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties in Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republication Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1950s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), and Forgiving A Majority: The Formation of the Republication Party in Pittsburgh, 1848-1860 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990); Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

8 No one did more to influence this approach to the study of the origins of American pluralism than Herbert G. Gutman, who joined labor and immigration history in a number of essays, but never completed the synthesis he seemed to be working toward for many years; see, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), and Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed., Ira Berlin (New York: The New Press, 1987). From Gutman's suggestive work, an interpretative line could be directly drawn to such important works as Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in A Textile City, 1914-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Lizabeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

9 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little and Brown, 1951), and Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Accultivation (New York: Atheneum, 1970, revised and enlarged ed.); Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949); Carl F. Wittke, The German Language Press in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), and The Irish in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), are titles representative of the social history of European immigration and immigrants prior to the New Social History. The social science literature is both summarized in and represented by Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), an effort to create order among and clarify various assimilation models, while never questioning their fundamental soundness.

10 John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

11 This critique surfaced in the late 1980s in two sharp and convincing essays contesting Herbert Gutman's work in labor history; see, Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and The United Mine Workers," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2 (Winter, 1988), 132-200; Melvyn Dubofsky, "Workers, Jews, and the American Past," Tikkun, 3 (May/June, 1988), 95-7. These works may be considered significant signals that the hegemony of the New Social History had begun its decline.

12 A major synthesis of the work on past transnational and re-emigration labor migrations during the industrial era is, Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrant Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
    On the transnational political activity, among many titles, see, Theodore Saloutos, Greeks in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Louis L. Gerson, The Hyphenate in Recent American Politics and Diplomacy (Lawrence, University of Kansas press, 1964); Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippencott Co., 1966); George J. Prpic, The Croation Immigrants in America (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971); John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1972); Sander Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); Frederick D. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Melvin Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzel to the Holocaust (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1975), and idem, We Are One!:American Jewry and Israel (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978); Donald Pienkos, For Your Freedom through Ours: Polish-American Efforts on Poland's Behalf, 1863-1991 (Boulder: Eastern European Monographs, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Valley: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921-1929 (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999).

13 Frank Thistlethwaite, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," XIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports (Uppsala, 1960), 5:32-60. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States, Arthur M. Schlesinger, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940).

14 An exemplary recent study, which is both transnational and comparative, and convincingly employs the concept of transnational networks alongside a critique of notion of chain migration is Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Land of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

15 W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927, 2nd ed.); George Stephenson, ed., "Typical 'American Letters,'" Swedish Historical Society Yearbook, 7 (1921), 52, "The Background of the Beginnings of Swedish Immigration, American Historical Review, 31 (July, 1926), 708-31, "When American Was the Land of Canaan," Minnesota History, 10 (September, 1929), 237-60; Theodore Blegen, ed., "Early 'America Letters,'" in Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860 (Northfield, Minn.: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1931) p. 196-213, and, ed., Land of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), pp. 3-14. For a survey of the history of the uses of immigrant letters in history and the social sciences, see, David A. Gerber, "The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: The Uses of Immigrant Personal Correspondence in Twentieth Century American Scholarship," Journal of American Ethnic History, 16 (Summer, 1997), 3-34.
    The difficulty interpreting letters led to a singular pattern of publications—collections that reprinted them, but declined any extended analysis. Nonetheless, these collections set high standards for editorial work and for general contextualizing discussions. See, for example, H. Arnold Barton, ed., Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840-1914, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975); Theodore C. Blegen, Land of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955); Herbert J. Brinks, ed., Dutch American Voices: Letters from The United States, 1850-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Alan Conway, ed., The Welsh in America: Letters from the Immigrants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961); Charlotte Erickson, ed., Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972); Frederick Hale, ed., Danes in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984); Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News From the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Leo Shelbert and Hedwig Rapport, eds., Alles Ist Ganz Anders Hier: Auswandererschicksale in Briefen aus Zwei Jahrhunderten (Freiburg: Walter-Verlag, 1977). Worth noting as a superior collection of non-United States materials, David Fitzpatrick, ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

16 "Transnational social field" is a concept central to transnational theory. Like the concept of "network," which encompasses informal and extended relations between individuals, but somewhat larger in the area of its analysis, a "social field" is compromised of both networks and formal organizations and institutions, both public and private, in both the homeland and host societies. This and other concepts central to transnational theory are conveniently laid out in, Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, "Towards A Definition of Transnationalism: Introductory Remarks and Research Questions," pp. ix-xiv, and "Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration," pp. 1-24, in iden, eds., Towards A Transnational Perspective on Migration; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc "Transnational Projects: A New Perspective," pp. 1-20, and "Theoretical Premises," pp. 21-48, in idem, eds., Nations Unbound; Guarnizo and Smith, "The Locations of Transnationalism," pp. 3-34, Sarah J. Mahler, "Theoretical and Empirical Contributions Toward A Research Agenda for Transnationalism," p. 63-102, in Smith and Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below; Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo, and Patricia Landholt, "Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of An Emergent Research Field," 217-37, Steven Vertovec, "Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism, 447-62, and Alejandro Portes, "Conclusion: Towards A New World—The Origins and Effects of Transnational Activities," 463-77, in Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (March, 1999); Alejandro Portes, "Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities," International Migration Review, 31 (Winter, 1997), 799-825.

17 Negotiations on what is to be written about and reciprocity in the exchange of letters is the subject of my own essay, "Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American Ethnic History, 19 (Summer, 2000), 3-23.

18 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Uif Hannerz, Transnational Communities (London: Routledge, 1996); Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York; Viking, 1988), and Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991).

19 Theorizing personal letters as both self-making and dialogue in the service of forming and maintaining a relationship is a vast subject that draws on literature from discourse theory, discursive psychology, narratology, and literary studies of the epistolary form of the novel. Rather than cite this vast bibliography, the reader might be recommended to my own practical efforts to use such an understanding of letters in the context of immigrant writing; see Gerber, "Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century," and "Ethnic Identification and the Project of Individual Identity: What We Can Learn From The Life of Mary Ann Woodrow Archbald (1768-1840) of Little Cambrae Island, Scotland and Auriesville, New York," Immigrants and Minorities, 17 (July, 1998). The Archbald letters, encompassing almost four decades of correspondence between a Scottish immigrant and her cousin, may be found in the Women's History Archive, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; and microfilm copies may be found in The History of Women Microfilm Collection, reel 965.

20 The role of letters in stimulating or retarding emigration is noted by editors of almost all the collections cited in n. 15, supra, which also cites the work of early twentieth century historians of Scandinavian immigration and the role of the "American Letter" in emigration. The "American Letter" was sent to family as a personal letter, but was intended to be read publicly or widely circulated.

21 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. I, Power, Property and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 26-108, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Policy Press, 1990), and Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1991. A useful overview (combined with a critique based on a large number of relevant texts) of Giddens's work is, John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1999), 20-70.

22 Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, "The Immigrant and the American Image in Europe, 1960-1914", Mississippi Valley Historical Review 37 (September, 1950), 212-13; Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home, pp. 27-28; Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mail Overseas (New York: New York University Press, 1964), pp. 108-41; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

23 Tomlinson, Globalizaton and Culture, p. 53; Jean Farrugia, The Letter Box: A History of Post Office Pillar and Wall Boxes (Sussex, U.K.: Centaur Press, 1969), 145 ff. Letter boxes began to be installed when pre-payment of letters came into being; prior to that time letters were personally hand-delivered to the addressee by letter carriers. In Britain, this began in 1840, with the postal reforms that introduced stamps, but its implementation was very uneven in Britain, just as it would be in the United States and elsewhere. Even in developed societies, implementation was still going on into the twentieth century.

24 Robinson, Carrying British Mail Overseas, pp. 112-6, 141; John, Spreading the News, p. 161; Alvin F. Harlow, Old Post Bags: The Story of the Sending of a Letter in Ancient and Modern Times (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1928), pp. 322-334, 420, 428-9.

25 The immigrant-as-modernizer paradigm never succeeded in having an impact on American immigration history, largely because post-World war II "modernization theory" fell into such deep political disrepute at the same time that the New Social History was being launched. It was charged with being a tool of American cold war foreign and military policy. The historian who for a time seemed most likely to produce work from the perspective of modernization was the late Timothy L. Smith. See, "New Approaches to the History of Immigration in Twentieth Century America," American Historical Review, 71 (July, 1966), 265-79; and "Immigrant Social Aspirations and American Education, 1880-1930," American Quarterly, 21 n. 2 (1969), 524-43. It may well be time to revive this line of inquiry, especially in light of the greatly more sophisticated views of modernity and the processes surrounding it associated today with Anthony Giddens and others.

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