David A. Gerber

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/authors-of-their-lives-the-personal-corresponden...

This book makes the argument that while historians have a tendency to use letters from migrants to give colour to accounts of the societies that they have moved to, we should not forget that the migrants themselves were people, negotiating family relationships between continents, dealing with unprecedented situations in a new home, working through the economic troughs and peaks that the country they have moved show more to inflected on them. The first 60% sets up a general theoretical framework and common themes, and then the last four chapters look at four migrants in particular to show how their correspondence with relatives back home played out in real time.

There were two standout chapters for me. Chapter 4, the shortest chapter in the main text of the book, simply looks at the impact of the introduction of state postal services. In the earlier period, letter-writers had to rely on less formal methods of sending letters, and the recipient paid, which had a big impact on how often you might write, or to whom. The introduction of postage stamps in the 1840s (first in the UK, but rapidly followed elsewhere) revolutionised communication. It’s a fascinating case where it was not a change in technology, but a reform to the economic model for delivery of a service, that drastically changed how we maintain contact with people.

And the first of Gerber’s four case studies is the most poignant: Thomas Spencer Niblock, son of a clergyman, born in Hitchin in 1820, emigrated to Australia in 1844 soon after his father’s death; but it did not work out, and he returned to England the next year, with his newly acquired Australian wife Matilda and their baby Joseph. Four years later, he left for Canada, and the surviving correspondence records his increasingly miserable attempts to make a go of farming in London, Ontario, begging his brother and sister in England for more money.

Finally his brother seems to have told him that they could not support him any more, and Niblock and his family went back to Australia in 1852 to try his luck in the goldfields. When, astonishingly, that didn’t work out, they decided to move along the coast to Sydney; and on 15 May 1853 their ship was wrecked on Tullaberga Island near Cape Howe due to a navigational error. Most of the crew survived, but most of the passengers were drowned, including the whole Niblock family (they may also have had another baby by then – the records are not clear).

It’s intense and heavily rooted in academe, so perhaps not for the casual reader, but I found it very thought-provoking. show less

This book provides a short, readable overview of US immigration discussing the legislation, the statistics, the proponents and the opponents around US immigration. Particularly valuable were the discussions of the motivations of immigrants. The one downside of the book is that it is from 2011 and therefore does not include a discussion of the more recent anti-immigrant movement.

Excellent history of immigration practices and policies in USA. Highly enjoyable read.