The letters Dutch immigrant Ulbe Eringa wrote home from the United States are rich with information on farming, the family, the household economy, church activities, and school involvement as he related them to his relatives back in the Netherlands. His memoirs, written in 1942 and 1943, supplement the letters and provide details about his life before emigrating. Brian Beltman's introduction and chapter-by-chapter commentary place Eringa's story within its historical context, complementing findings that there has been more continuity than discontinuity between the European past and the American ethnic experience.

In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a "transplanted" people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their everyday lives a world that ensured their cultural longevity and social cohesiveness in a new land. Their adaptation to the New World required new concepts of social boundary and community, new strategies of land ownership and legacy, new associations, and new ways of interacting with markets. In Hidden Worlds, historian Royden Loewen illuminates some of these adaptations, which have been largely overshadowed by an emphasis on institutional history, or whose sources have only recently been revealed. Through an analysis of diaries, wills, newspaper articles, census and tax records, and other literature, an examination of inheritance practices, household dynamics, and gender relations, and a comparison of several Mennonite communities in the United States and Canada, Loewen uncovers the multi-dimensional and highly resourceful character of the 1870s migrants.

Since Henry Hudson landed on Manhattan in 1609, the peoples of the Netherlands and North America have been inextricably linked. Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, written by a team of nearly one hundred Dutch and American scholars, is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of this bilateral relationship. This volume covers the main paths of contacts, conflicts, and common plans, from the first exploratory contacts in the early seventeenth century to the intense and multifaceted exchanges in the early twenty-first. Based on the most up-to-date research, Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations will be for years to come a valuable and much-used reference work for anyone interested in the history and culture of the United States and the Netherlands and the larger transatlantic interdependent framework in which they are embedded.

"Examining the domain of the home as well as the related realms of education, religion, health care, and worldview, Sinke discerns women's contributions to the creation and adaptation of families and communities, pointing out how they differed from those of men. Through Sinke's articulate and captivating descriptions of real women, the statistical evidence comes to life, providing valuable and heretofore unexamined views on the international marriage market, language shifts, the acquisition of American customs, the church's role in adaptation, and the shifting economies that allowed women to work outside the home. A parallel analysis of the United States and the Netherlands as developing welfare states provides a fascinating look at what Dutch immigrant women left behind compared to what they faced in America regarding health care, education, and quality-of-life issues."--BOOK JACKET.

The obstacles to assimilation and treatment of immigrant women are major issues confronting the leading immigrant-receiving nations today-the United States, Canada, and Australia. This volume provides a range of perspectives on the concerns, the sources of problems, how issues might be addressed, and the future of immigrant women. It is based upon a two-part issue of the journal Gender Issues, and contains a new introduction by the editor. The first section focuses on labor force experiences of women who have immigrated to the United States and Australia from Mexico and Latin America, Eastern Europe, Korea, the Philippines, India and other parts of Asia. Nancy Foner assesses the complex and contradictory ways that migration changes women's status. Cynthia Crawford focuses on Mexican and Salvadoran women who have recently moved into janitorial work in Los Angeles. M.D.R. Evans and Tatjiana Lucik analyze labor force participation of immigrants in Australia and family strategies of women migrants from the former Yugoslavia against the experiences of woman migrants from the Mediterranean world and other parts of the Slavic world. Economist Harriet Duleep reviews what is known as the family investment model. Monica Boyd tackles the controversial issue of the leading immigrant-receiving nations' unwillingness to declare gender an explicit ground for persecution and thus for gaining -refugee status. The second section deals with social class and English language acquisition, the obstacles women have had to overcome in gaining refugee status in the United States and Canada, and a comparison of movement patterns between different commentaries in Mexico and the United States on the part of Mexican male and female immigrants. Contributors include Suzanne M. Sinke, Katharine Donato, and Nina Toren. Immigrant Women will be valuable to researchers in women's studies, population demographics, as well as those teaching courses in sociology, history, and immigration. Rita James Simon is university professor in the School of Public Affairs at the Washington College of Law at American University. She is editor of Gender Issues and author of The American Jury, The Insanity Defense: A Critical Assessment of Law and Policy in the Post-Hinckley Era (with David Aaronson), Adoption, Race, and Identity (with Howard Altstein), In the Golden Land: A Century of Russian and Soviet Jewish Immigration, Social Science Data and Supreme Court Decisions (with -Rosemary Erickson), and Abortion: Statutes, Policies, and Public Attitudes the World Over.

Alternative Rhetorics questions traditional canons of rhetorical thought, and offers new perspectives on rhetorics historically overlooked within Western culture. Along with establishing new methodologies for investigating the history of rhetorics, the book also explores rhetoric's changing relationship with technology. By challenging the reader's understanding of rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition, Alternative Rhetorics provides insights that will allow researchers, educators, and students to rethink their own position in a rhetorical world.

New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even "define" a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of "defining" has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition.Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pieces from well-known historian Gerald Friesen and Governor-General's Award-winning writer Robert Kroetsch, these 13 essays are as diverse as the region itself. In their examination of different aspects of Prairie history, literature, climate, society, culture, and identity, they help to provide a new understanding of this place and of the complexities of its definition.

Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The writers featured were ordinary rural people: young women and grandmothers, rural preachers and landless householders. They include a teenaged boy who immigrated from Russia to Manitoba in 1875 as well as a successful merchant, a traveling evangelist, and a devout, conservative church elder. An elderly grandfather recounted the daily circuit of his children's homes, while 19-year-old Marie Schoeder wrote of her literary aspirations, her "secret hope" that some day she would "write things that have a real worth, things that are worth printing, and things that other folks would love to read and pay for." From the Inside Out also contrasts diaries from two distinct Mennonite communities in Canada. The Swiss-American Mennonites in Waterloo County, Ontario, faced rapid urbanization, while the Dutch-Russian Mennonites in southern Manitoba maintained their more rural environment. The diaries mirror their writers' preoccupations with work and weather, but they also reveal a communityís social structure and round of activities such as weddings, funerals, and worship services. In the process of diary-keeping, the writers sought to make sense of a dynamic and often unpredictable world. Reading what they chose to record is to learn much about their culture. Their writings provide glimpses of their lives, their collective mindset, and their history as a people.

Books recommended for undergraduate and college libraries listed by Library of Congress Classification Numbers.

The migrant letter, whether written by family members, lovers, friends, or others, is a document that continues to attract the attention of scholars and general readers alike. What is it about migrant letters that fascinates us? Is it nostalgia for a distant, yet desired past? Is it the consequence of the eclipse of letter-writing in an age of digital communication technologies? Or is it about the parallels between transnational experiences in previous mass migrations and in the current globalized world, and the centrality of interpersonal relations, mobility, and communication, then and now? Influenced by methodologies from diverse disciplines, the study of migrant letters has developed in myriad directions. Scholars have examined migrant letters through such lenses as identity and self-making, family relations, gender, and emotions. This volume contributes to this discussion by exploring the connection between the practice of letter writing and the emotional, economic, familial, and gendered experiences of men and women separated by migration. It combines theoretical and empirical discussions which illuminate a variety of historical experiences of migrants who built transnational lives as they moved across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. This volume was originally published as a special issue of The History of Family.