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ABSTRACTS
| David A. Gerber, "Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence"
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In Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe, his thought provoking essay on the premodern family, Stephen Ozment justifies dependence on personal letters to document family dynamics, stating, "Particularly in correspondence between family members, colleagues, friends, and lovers, where clarity and truth have a premium and can be matters of life and death, 'live' personal reactions to people, experiences, and events have been preserved as reliably as can be done in historical sources." Precisely, however, because the psychological and material stakes are highest in dealing with such significant others, the costs of "clarity and truth" may often be deemed too high by writers of personal letters. On the basis of research in the correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay accounts for the telling of untruths and the maintenance of strategic silences through examining the real world of situations and choices within which immigrants sought simultaneously to maintain ties with family, kin and friends in their homelands and to mislead those same parties about the circumstances of their lives.
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| Benjamin J. Lammers, "The Birth of the East Ender: Neighborhood and Local Identity in Interwar East London"
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Until the interwar period, the term "the East End" functioned largely as a metaphor, symbolizing problems of urban poverty and crime. The term had little meaning for the residents of the area, whose horizons were limited to the immediate surroundings of street and neighborhood. These surroundings provided a localized sense of community, and formed the basis of working-class networks of reciprocity. The Jewish residents of the East End were not part of these communities—they formed their own localized communities that were also based on territory and exchange. In the interwar period, however, a new community was created. Due to a series of developments in work patterns, leisure, and politics, the horizons of the East End's residents began to expand, to encompass the entire East End. For the first time they began to see themselves as East Enders, a local identity which included both the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of the area.
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| Nicoletta F. Gullace, "Friends, Aliens, and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915"
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In May, 1915, a wave of anti-alien rioting spread through the poorer neighborhoods of Liverpool, Manchester, London, and other English cities, resulting in the most wide-spread civic unrest in modern British history. The ostensible cause of the rioting was the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915 by a German U-boat hiding off the Irish coast. This essay examines the riots in the context of neighborhood politics and family life, focusing particularly on the impact of the riots on interpersonal relations. While the German navy sank the Lusitania, ordinary Britons ransacked, beat, and looted German neighbors who were often long-time associates and friends. Unable to stem the riots though police measures and legal action alone, the government responded to popular hostility with the internment of enemy aliens and the repatriations of large numbers of ethnic Germans. This paper draws on archival and published materials to make sense of the local and interpersonal dimensions of the Lusitania riots and to explore the emotional dimensions of civic expulsion.
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| Laura Tabili, "Having Lived Beside Them All the Time: Negotiating National Identities Through Personal Networks". . . |
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