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Notes n o t e s to t h e i n t ro du c t i o n 1. My interest in this book is in immigrant letters to family and friends in the homeland . The reader should be aware, however, that, though discussed in this book only occasionally , immigrants wrote business letters and other types of personal letters, principally to other immigrants, coethnics, and non-coethnic, native-born settlers in the host societies. Whether because of the vagaries of the processes of saving and collection, or the fact that fewer of these were written, they appear to be much fewer in number. See H. Arnold Barton , “Neglected Types of Correspondence as Sources for Swedish-American History,” Swedish-American Historical Quarterly 33 n. 2 (1982): 76–8. On the psychological and material purposes of personal correspondence for the ordinary letter-writing immigrant in the historical past, see Eric Richards, “A Voice from Below: Benjamin Boyce in South Australia, 1839–1846,” Labour History (Australia) 27 (November 1974): 65; Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972), 5–7; H. Arnold Barton, “Two Versions of the Immigrant Experience ,” Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly 30 n. 3 (1979): 159–61; Niels Peter Stilling, “The Significance of the Private Letter in Immigration History,” The Bridge 15 n. 1 (1992): 35–50. 2. The special qualities of handwritten, personal letters were made clear to the Pakistani immigrant cabdriver, Hamid Ali, when he took advantage of the availability of a video teleconferencing facility in Brooklyn, at $5 a minute, to call-see his family in his homeland. For four minutes his sister “harangued him for not writing. He protested that he phoned weekly; his sister told him letters were better; they could be fingered and re-read and kept under pillows.” Deborah Sontag and Celia W. Duggar, “The New Immigrant Tide: A Shuttle between Worlds,” New York Times (July 19, 1998). Also see Sarah J. Mahler, “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions toward a Research Agenda for Transnationalism,” Transnationalism from Below, Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnico, Comparative Urban and Community Research, v. 6 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 76–81. 3. A. Langton, Early Days in Upper Canada: Letters of John Langton from the Backwoods of Upper Canada and the Audit Office of the Province of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926); John Langton to father, Fenelon, Upper Canada, February 28, 1834, NAC; George Flower, Diary, v. II [1816– ], Chicago Historical Society; George Flower Letterbook, 1816–1817, George Flower Letters, ISHS. 4. Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984); Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1982); William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the 339 Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Martine Reid, “Ecriture Intime et Destinaire,” and Bernard Beugnot, “De l’Invention Epistolaire: A la Maniere de Soi,” in L’Epistolarité à Travers les Siècles: Geste de Communication et/ou d’Écriture, ed. Mirelle Bossis and Charles D. Parker (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 20–6, 29–38. 5. Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963); Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), and idem, Acts of Meanings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and idem, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54 (Spring 1987): 11–32; Joseph B. Jahasz, “Social Identity in the Context of Human and Personal Identity,” in Studies in Social Identity, ed. Theodore R. Sarbin and Carl E. Scheibe (New York: Praeger, 1983): 289–318. 6. Redford, The Converse of the Pen, 9, 16. 7. A list of titles of outstanding, representative works on European immigrants would be very difficult to create without major omissions, but I have in mind such works on immigrant social bonds as, for example, these studies, each of them distinctive in conceptualization or methodology, and in some cases, pioneering: Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California ItalianAmericans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Bruce Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); Victor Greene, For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Ethnic Consciousness in America, 1860–1910 (Madison: Wisconsin...

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