Teaching History Through Immigration Stories

Abstract

W hat is typical immigrant story? Most of my students at Trinity College?a small, selective, liberal arts institu tion in Connecticut?would frame answer conven tionally, in terms of what they vaguely know: people coming from Ireland or Pale to escape persecution, avoid draft, have enough to eat, practice their religion in peace, or participate in something they like to the American dream. Of course, from viewpoint of a serious historian, question is more of a problem than answer?after all, no single set of experiences can typify enormously varied processes which brought people to these shores. Pilgrims came to insure their own but no one else's?religious practices; Africans were brought in chains; around turn ofthe last century most Jews came in families and stayed, while a majority of Southern Italians were single men who returned to their homeland (1). Besides, if one is teaching history ofthe United States in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, why should one be interested in narratives other than historical one being constructed and examined in class? Why get involved with complicating fictions or even those forms of fiction we call autobiography ? The short answer to such questions is that strategic use of literary texts is effective in engaging students. The longer answer involves asking what our classroom objectives might be. We are interested in helping students first to grasp and then to get of events that constitute historical accounts. But there are at least two stumbling blocks to their doing so. First, like most of us, students carry around in their heads certain unexamined no tions?for example, about typical immigrant story?which often keep them from reading evidence, evaluating it sensibly, and posing alternative explanations, all central tasks in achieving historical knowledge. And, second, getting inside events requires acts of imagination. Literary texts are very helpful, both in penetrating ideological screens that disable student perceptions, and in modeling for them ways of imagining others' lives in other times and other places. It is also true, of course, that any text can be read, with great care and modesty, as historical and ethnographic evidence. Mary Rowlandson's narrative of her captivity by Indians tells us something about Narragansett, something also about beginnings of what would become an important literary-religious genre, but probably most of all, it tells us about world view of a group of late seventeenth-century English settlers in New World. The texts I will be discussing here illuminate cultural conflicts generated when rural people migrated a century or so ago to growing cities not only ofthe Western hemisphere but also of Europe. In this sense, texts constitute not so much evidence for historian's files, which, with a variety of other more empirical data, might be used to draw conclusions; rather, they represent historical speculations that express certain structures of feeling of people in historical moments about which we study (2). The United States of a century ago seems to most of our students extraordinarily remote?a world still poised between horse power as a literal statement and as a metaphor of measure, between daguerreotype and moving picture, between presumed and long celebrated virtues of agrarian life and newly consolidated