This collection addresses the recent rebirth of interest in immigrant letters. As these letters are increasingly seen as key, rather than incidental, documents in the interpretations of gender, age, social class, and ethnicity/nationality, the scholars gathered here demonstrate a diversity of new approaches to their interpretation.
Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chavez-Garcia demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned. With this richly detailed account, ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, Chavez-Garcia opens a new window onto the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of the day and recovers the human agency of much maligned migrants in our society today.
In 1920, at the age of thirteen, Irmgard Gebensleben first traveled from Germany to The Netherlands on a "war-children transport." She would later marry a Dutch man and live and raise her family there while keeping close to her German family and friends through the frequent exchange of letters. Yet during this period geography was not all that separated them. Increasing divergence in political opinions and eventual war between their countries meant letters contained not only family news but personal perspectives on the individual, local, and national choices that would result in the most destructive war in history. This important collection, first assembled by Irmgard Gebensleben's daughter Hedda Kalshoven, gives voice to ordinary Germans in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and in the occupied Netherlands. The correspondence between Irmgard, her friends, and four generations of her family delve into their most intimate and candid thoughts and feelings about the rise of National Socialism. The responses to the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands expose the deeply divided loyalties of the family and reveal their attempts to bridge them. Of particular value to historians, the letters evoke the writers' beliefs and their understanding of the events happening around them. This first English translation of Ik denk zoveel aan jullie: Een briefwisseling tussen Nederland en Duitsland 1920-1949, has been edited, abridged, and annotated by Peter Fritzsche with the assent and collaboration of Hedda Kalshoven. After the book's original publication the diary of Irmgard's brother and loyal Wehrmacht soldier, Eberhard, was discovered and edited by Hedda Kalshoven. Fritzsche has drawn on this important additional source in his preface.
A critical resource for K-12 educators that serve BIPOC and first-generation students that explores why inclusive and culturally relevant pedagogy is necessary to ensure the success of their students The practices and values in the US educational system position linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse children and families at a disadvantage. BIPOC dropout rates and levels of stress and anxiety have linked with non-inclusive school environments. In this collection, 3 educators tell and will draw on their experiences as immigrants and educators to address racial inequity in the classroom and provide a thorough analysis of different strategies that create an inclusive classroom environment. White educators that serve BIPOC students will benefit from these reflections on incorporating culturally relevant pedagogies that value the diverse experiences of their students. With a focus on Haitian and Dominican students in the US, the authors will reveal the challenges that immigrant and first-generation students face. They’ll also offer insights about topics such as: • How do language policies and social justice intersect? • How can educators use culturally relevant teaching and community funds of knowledge to enrich school curriculum? • How can educators center the needs of the student within the classroom? • How can educators support Haitian Creole-speaking students?
This exploration of the versatility of writing systems highlights their complexity when used for more than one language. The approaches of authors from different academic traditions provide a varied and expert account.
A haunting and darkly funny post-apocalyptic graphic novel that follows an unusual postal worker on his very bizarre mail route. Amid the blasted rubble of a once-perfect suburb, a hazmat-suited postman delivers the mail, aloud. He shouts his letters down a vent to the bunker-bound family below. They describe the family's prosperous past life, and then get stranger and stranger... Drawn by the famed cartoonish and Charlie Hebdo contributor Gébé, and never before available in English, Letter to Survivors is a blackhearted delight, a scathing, impassioned send-up of consumerist excess and nuclear peril: funnier—and scarier—than ever.
France, 1941. Janine, a Jewish teenager, and Roland, her Catholic boyfriend, are passionately in love, and believe that nothing can come between them. But World War II intervenes, and Janine is forced to flee the Nazis with her family. They set sail from the docks of Marseille on one of the last ships to take Jews to safety. For 50 years, the last memory she has of Roland is an image of him in a rowboat on the sea, desperately trying to catch a last glimpse of her as the ship speeds towards the horizon. Janine and her family become refugees in Cuba and, later, settle in the United States. Their new world is unpredictable, but the family is bound together by love and their memories of happier years in Europe. Janine marries and has a family of her own, but never forgets her love for Roland. Decades later, Janine’s daughter, journalist Leslie Maitland, decides to track down the lost love who has haunted her mother for so many years. What happens when she finds Roland changes all of their lives irrevocably, and proves that even the worst violence of the 20th century is not enough to extinguish hope, passion, and romance. Crossing the Borders of Time is at once an expansive history, a deeply personal family memoir, and a brilliant work of investigative journalism by an award-winning former New York Times reporter. Yet, above all else, it is a unique love story that will move you from the first page to its touching conclusion.
Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.
This volume illustrates the significance of epistolarity as a literary phenomenon intricately interwoven with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural developments. Rejecting the common categorization of letters as primarily private documents, this collection of essays demonstrates the genre's persistent public engagements with changing cultural dynamics of the revolutionary, early republican, and antebellum eras. Sections of the collection treat letters' implication in transatlanticism, authorship, and reform movements as well as the politics and practices of editing letters. The wide range of authors considered include Mercy Otis Warren, Charles Brockden Brown, members of the Emerson and Peabody families, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stoddard, Catherine Brown, John Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. The volume is particularly relevant for researchers in U.S. literature and history, as well as women's writing and periodical studies. This dynamic collection offers scholars an exemplary template of new approaches for exploring an understudied yet critically important literary genre.
A sweeping exploration of revolutionary ideas that traveled the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records--books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more--to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America's founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.