Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century

by David A. Gerber

AFTER MANY DECADES of presenting historians with a perplexing combination of analytical opportunities and interpretive problems that almost succeeded in creating a stalemate in our ability to make systematic use of it, the immigrant letter is again insistently presenting itself for our attention. Immigrant letters have long been recognized as offering a unique opportunity—they are the most widely proliferated and in volume the largest source we possess of the writings of ordinary people. At present, too, there are compelling disciplinary reasons leading us back to immigrant letters. The effort to find ways to use these letters has lately grown in intensity alongside the burgeoning interest in personal and popular texts, textuality, narrativity, discourse, and linguistic theory in both the humanities and the social sciences. At the same time, however, as I have suggested in a recent essay in this journal, it has not proven any easier for contemporary historians to conceive of methods for decoding immigrant letters than it did for either the early twentiethcentury sociologists William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki or social historians such as Theodore Blegen, George Stephenson, and Marcus Lee Hansen, all of whom were pioneers in the effort to make analytical use of immigrant letters.