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| Format | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Author, Analytic | Krawatzek, Felix, and Emma Moreton |
| Title, Analytic | Finding Home in Irish and German Migrant Letters: A Comparative Analysis |
| Journal Title | Social Science History |
| Date of Publication | Spring 2025 |
| Volume ID | 49 |
| Issue ID | 1 |
| Location in Work | 75–103 |
| View Online | |
| Abstract | In this article we explore how notions of home compare between migrants who arrived in the US throughout the 19th and 20th century. We can draw on a uniquely rich comparative set of letters written by people who left German-speaking Europe or Ireland. Our analysis of more than 12,000 letters uses methods of linguistic analysis to navigate between a macro-perspective, focused on term frequencies, a meso-perspective focused on the contextual meaning of the terms home and Heimat, and a micro-perspective providing in-depth details of two sets of letter collections. We find that the emotional words used to express an affective link with home reveal a deeper process of socio-cultural integration among the two groups. Indeed, we find that home is being talked about a lot more frequently in the Irish compared to the German letters, pointing to a profound divergence in the integration process. In the German letters, America quickly became home, which occurred at a much slower rate among the Irish. Moreover, the Irish maintained a desire to return home to Ireland for longer, an idea that the German writers contemplated only rarely. |
| Notes | The authors worked with letters from the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha and the Irish Emigration Database at the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies in Omagh, Northern Ireland. |
| Call Number | Digital file (PDF) |
| MKI Terms | Letters/ Emigration and immigration (Germany-US)/ Emigration and immigration (Ireland-US)/ Sociology/ Ethnic identity |