Take a Letter…

Although David Gerber engages some of the traditional themes of immigration history in Authors of Their Lives, this book is not a conventional work in the field. Sure, it deals with questions of identity, including its loss, resistance to its loss, and its reconstruction. But while most immigration historians think of identity in terms of ethnicity and community, Gerber argues that such a focus misses issues related to the personal and individual identity that was in fact more salient in the lives of most immigrants (and indeed most others as well). Moreover, the book barely mentions two other themes that have dominated most recent historical writing on immigration. Like most social historians of the last several decades, Gerber wants to recover the inner world of the immigrants and other "ordinary" people. He wants to let their voices be heard, and so he turns to the letters they wrote to each other. It turns out that these intimate sources have little to say about race and politics, the preoccupations of many recent historians.

Not that Gerber has nothing to say about ethnicity. His subjects made up the third largest immigrant group of the nineteenth century, behind the Catholic Irish and the Germans. But these "invisible immigrants" blended easily into the American cultural and racial mainstream. Coming from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, they were English-speaking, Protestant, and relatively skilled. Some of them even arrived with a little bit of capital to invest in farms and businesses. Judging from their letters, British communal life simply was not that important to the writers. There are few references to societies, and none to the churches, newspapers, or dense neighborhoods that provided the framework of other ethnic groups. Rather, aside from an occasional ceremonial occasion, the British immigrants joined with their American neighbors in these kinds of communal endeavor. Moreover, the immigrants' anti-Catholicism helped them to bond with the Americans. Some even joined the nativist movement.

Informally, however, British immigrants did differentiate themselves from Americans, whom they often criticized harshly for their commercialism. The immigrants at least sometimes made a conscious effort to maintain their dialects, and even to pass them on. They had a preference for British friends and expressed nostalgia for the old country and its customs.

But the aspect of British culture that Gerber finds most interesting did not push the immigrants toward a distinct ethnic identity and certainly not toward a cohesive communal life. Indeed, it was something that the British immigrants shared with Anglo-Americans, namely a well-developed awareness of self and of the individual's separation from others. This sense of individuation nurtured a vocabulary in the English language that the letter writers could use to construct coherent narratives of their own lives and experiences, distinct from, but in relation to, those of their correspondents. If one of the main points of corresponding in the first place was for the immigrants to "author their own lives," as the book's title suggests, then a sense of self as both author and subject, along with the necessary vocabulary, were preconditions for doing so.

A sense of self is also important because Gerber is more interested in how individuals elaborated a personal identity than how they coalesced into groups. The weak ethnic communal life of the British immigrants underscores the point, but Gerber contends that personal identity is more basic and more pervasive in all people's lives than are their group affiliations. Most of what immigration historians have written about as "identity" was really, Gerber argues, "identification"—defined as "voluntary and particularistic, and . . . episodically experienced and episodically brought to consciousness" (p. 65). Identity, by contrast, "encompasses" much more "broadly" a person's understanding of self. Implicitly, it is not episodic, less externally oriented (though it is always defined in relation to others), and, perhaps, not as conscious. It is the core of the individual's psychological being.

Necessarily, Gerber cites social psychologists...