| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1830–1930. By Victor R. Greene. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004. xxviii, 215 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-87338-794-5.)

In the musical Camelot, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere warble the question, "What do the simple folk do?" Social and cultural historians wonder much the same thing. We also want to know what those who preceded us thought and felt about what they did. Where literary sources are scarce we can resort to what common men and women sang instead of what they wrote. Folklorists and cultural anthropologists have long treated the music of a people as a gateway to their thoughts and feelings. African American scholars lacking slave diaries and letters turned to story and song for answers. Only recently, however, have immigration historians done the same, critically analyzing the music of the foreign-born (including the lyrics) to know their minds.

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