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Reviews in American History 32.3 (2004) 305-316



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What Is It We Seek to Find in First-Person Documents?

Documenting Society and Cultural Practices in Irish Immigrant Writings

Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ix + 788 pp. Appendices, sources, and index. $74.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).

Exquisitely produced by Oxford University Press and elaborately edited by four senior scholars, this long anticipated volume of nearly eight hundred pages is a monument to years of exacting detective and analytical work and to the craft of editing historical documents, mostly personal (or first-person) texts, for presentation and interpretation. It simultaneously contributes to the interpretation of the histories of Ireland, North America, and the Atlantic basin; offers a striking discussion of Irish national identities among Protestants and Catholics in Ireland and in the diaspora; and contributes to the understanding of various Hiberno-English dialects evolved in Ireland and transported around the globe. It provides imposing documentation of the large Irish presence in both the northern and southern colonies and in the Early Republic and demonstrates convincingly that international networks held together by trade and letters—even under the precarious circumstances of slow-moving sailcraft and primitive international postal connections—transformed much of the Atlantic basin, from the Caribbean to the Canadas, into an Irish lake.

While making these contributions, Irish Immigrants in The Land of Canaan also raises familiar questions of fundamental significance for the editing, presentation, and interpretation of the documents left to us by historical subjects. How are we to approach these documents? What is our relationship to the people who produced them and those for whom they were produced? Whose interpretive logic is to be valued in interpreting first-person texts: that of those who produced them or that of those who seek to edit and to interpret them in line with contemporary, professional and political discourses? Are these agendas at cross-purposes or may they be made complementary? [End Page 305] Perhaps an effective balance should be sought in analytical efforts to understand first-person texts between two especially plausible and desirable goals: on the one hand, understanding the shared cultural practices and processes of cultural production embedded in texts; on the other hand, using texts as the basis for social documentation that is concerned with matters such as politics, often largely outside the structures, forms, and purposes of the texts. This is a dense thicket of methodological, interpretive and ultimately also ethical issues that the editors do not confront as directly as this reviewer would have wished. Rather than explicitly problematizing such issues that are familiar to cultural historians, the editors have chosen mostly to risk their courage in what is a far more contentious sphere—confronting the polemics about national, religious, and ethnic identity that are current in Irish historiography, which is, in contrast, no mere dense thicket, but instead a veritable forest of thorns and nettles. The result is a volume that often serves well in the discussion for which it was intended by its editors, but may serve some scholarly audiences less completely because of the problems that lie in wait in historical documents abide.

This volume is largely, though not exclusively composed of immigrant letters, and, in terms of genre, probably takes its inspiration as a documents collection most directly from the nearly century-old tradition, which dates from William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's multivolume, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920), of the extensive publication of such letters in their original form in the collection format.1 Thomas and Znaniecki were the first immigration specialists to recognize that the immense body of correspondence generated by international population movements provided unique opportunities for the analysis of the ways in which ordinary people experience social change. Immigrant letters probably are, in fact, the...

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