Exploring the Digitizing Immigrant Letters Project as a Teaching Tool

Abstract

FOR THIS FORUM on teaching, we show how we use letters sent between migrants and non-migrants in the classroom for an undergraduate interdisciplinary course on gender and international migration. Our scope is to identify some of the ways in which students can study digitally accessible letters along with other biographical material (photographs, manuscripts, and videos) for discussing in class the interaction between gender dynamics and migration experiences. A further goal of ours is to enhance students’ appreciation of issues related to the access and preservation of historical documents, and explore the efficacy of using migrant correspondence as a viable online source for studying past migration movements. The Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota is home to one of the largest collections of books, newspapers, archival sources, personal papers, and other documents related to immigrants and refugees who settled in the United States after 1848, with a majority of materials produced between 1880 and 1980. Recently, the IHRC began to digitize immigrant letters as part of the Digitizing Immigrant Letters (DIL) project that was initiated in 2009 by the IHRC director, Donna Gabaccia; Lead Scholar Sonia Cancian; and IHRC Curator Daniel Necas. Many of the documents they and their team of librarians; curators; and postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students selected, transcribed, translated, and digitized consist of letters that were sent to and from immigrants. The letters included in the DIL project come from thirteen different families; much of the correspondence was written in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the digitized collections include original manuscripts, audio readings, and photographs; some include short video documentaries. English translations are provided for all of the letters, in addition to contextualized descriptions for the individual collections and their letter writers. By providing a transcription (in some cases, from Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet) and translation of the original texts, the DIL’s letter collections immediately became accessible to a global audience of English-speaking students, teachers,