Walter D. Kamphoefner

How Representative are Emigrant Letters? An Exploration of the German Case

Of the millions of letters sent to Europe by immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century, only a tiny, infinitesimal fraction has been preserved and is available to researchers. The lion’s share has been forgotten, discarded, destroyed, or left in place when the bulldozers moved in. But besides the few letters accessible in archives and collections, there must be far more still in the hands of individuals who, for various reasons, could not be reached by any public appeal to make their treasures available and have them professionally preserved or were not convinced that they should.

German-American Bilingualism: Cui Malo? Mother Tongue and Socioeconomic Status among the Second Generation in 1940.

This study utilizes language data from the 1940 Census Public Use Sample to measure the socioeconomic impact of foreign mother tongue by comparing second-generation Germans who grew up speaking German and English respectively. The most striking contrast between the two groups was the much higher proportion of German speakers in the farm population. While Germanophones showed slightly lower levels of income, this was balanced by greater social stability. In fact, German speakers showed higher levels of homeownership and self-employment. As a whole, the disadvantages of a foreign mother tongue proved to be relatively minor, indeed negligible for this group.

Comparative Migration History by the Numbers (and the Letters)

Donald Harmon Akenson of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, has capped a career of migration scholarship with an ambitious interpretation of Irish and Swedish migration, particularly their emigration histories, during what he calls “the ‘true’ nineteenth century” from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War I (1). It is a migration history like no other. With the freedom conveyed by six honorary doctorates, Akenson writes in a conversational, often humorous first-person style that one warns graduate students against, but his arguments are well thought out and dead serious. His approach is admittedly pluralistic, decrying historians’ “general retreat from engagement with systematic quantitative information” and the “excesses of critical theory” (2) while at the same time appreciative of the insights offered by cultural approaches. Devotees of multiple regression and time-series analysis will be disappointed. The author intends the work to be accessible to “[a]nyone who can reconcile his or her own bank statement,” with cliometric material “translated into English” (3). Akenson’s approach to statistical sources is similarly balanced; for all the talk about transnationalism, “without the curatorial function of the state, not much deep social history would be written” (7), yet in enumerating migrants “officialdom never quite catches up with reality” (21). A considerable portion of the book is devoted to a weighing of various quantitative estimates of different migration streams and other demographic indicators. Not only is this done judiciously, the author is also candid about the degree of uncertainty in the numbers he is dealing with. What Akenson presents, in an almost essayistic manner, is an interpretation of Irish emigration based on his own and others’ research, juxtaposed with parallels and some contrasts from Sweden based above all on extensive readings in the literature in both English and Swedish, including ear-

History by the Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (review)

repeat offenders—so that ofacials of the state could always recognize and control them. Photography, Bertillonage, angerprints, and, most recently, dna typing have all attracted their adherents. Cole argues that the effort to establish identities and make connections to crimes was a creative cultural process in which hard science did not determine the outcome. State bureaucrats relied on both their own and the public’s belief in the veracity of science to construct identiacation systems. Cole creatively and convincingly demonstrates that European and American (North as well as South) cultural commitments privileged scientiac approaches to social issues over other methods. Although this preference may not seem particularly surprising, Cole is particularly adept at showing how a claim to scientiac rigor foreclosed serious questioning of that claim’s validity. That distinction is the basis for Cole’s principal concern about the long struggle to establish a criminal’s identity. He documents not only how angerprinting came to dominate that struggle; he also reveals how disturbing deaciencies in the now-widespread reliance on partial prints as the basis for “positive” identiacation evolved, and how that development has created potential, as well as actual, problems for individual and minority rights. Cole bases his careful exegesis of the process by which angerprinting came to be enshrined in the criminal-justice system on an exhaustive and far-ranging analysis of French, British, South American, and North American sources. He is also well versed in the technical characteristics and scientiac validity of the identiacation systems that he analyzes. Cole’s implicit concerns about the potential abuse of authority through the misuse of oawed techniques for establishing connections between individuals and their alleged crimes, however, outweigh any explicit theoretical discussion of the processes by which scientiac and technological processes become diffused throughout a particular culture. Cole tells an important story, and he tells it well.

The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri

The author offers many new insights for students of migration and ethnicity across several social science disciplines. Focusing on the ordinary immigrants who have often been ignored in the historical record, he demonstrates that German newcomers arrived with fewer resources than previously supposed but that they were remarkably successful in becoming independent farmers.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.