Passenger Lists Research Articles

Commodifying Terrorism

Commodifying Terrorism

The role of family and community in the decision to emigrate: evidence from a case study of Scottish emigration to Queensland 1885–88

Australian passenger lists for British emigrants to Queensland in the 19th century have provided a data source of nominal information for emigrants which is not available in British emigration records. The information from these lists (for the years 1885–88) has been incorporated into a specially designed database of Scottish emigrants to Queensland. Nominal linkage with the Census Enumerator Books of 1881 added considerable personal information for more than half the cohort of Scots identified on the lists, and provided a view of the distribution of emigrants prior to leaving Scotland, hitherto unobtainable. When the addresses of emigrants were linked to dates of emigration and mapped, the impact of place of residence on the decision to emigrate to Queensland was demonstrated. Hence it has been possible to analyse the influences of local circumstance, family, friends and neighbourhood in the reconstruction of this emigrant group.

KAMEDO Report No. 77 Sinking of the MS Sleipner, 26 November 1999

The catamaran HS Sleipner struck a rock and sunk in bad weather and heavy seas on 26 November 1999. Rescue efforts were provided by helicopters and other ships. A total of 68 victims were rescued alive and 16 died, mostly by drowning. Problems were encountered with evacuation, life jackets, and life rafts. Most of those rescued alive suffered from hypothermia. Response times for rescue helicopters should be improved. Emphasis should be placed on correct manifest lists of passengers and crew. Special emphasis must be placed on media relations and cross-boundary issues. Exercises should focus on cooperation and coordination.

The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond

The History of Ideas:Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and Beyond Anthony Grafton In the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name" on the table in his waiting room. True, Robbins did not exist: he was the fictional president of Randall Jarrell's equally fictional Benton, a liberal arts dystopia where "[h]alf of the college was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."1 But Jarrell's notation of the Journal's status was accurate nonetheless.2 The Journal, in the twenty years or so after its foundation, attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. And it occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, [End Page 1] each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, often based not in disciplines but in liberal arts colleges and universities, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essays. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator—or at least made a good impression on his coffee table. Bliss was it to be a subscriber in that happy day when the JHI glowed with something of the luster that haloed Representations in the 1980s and Critical Inquiry more recently.3 The main reason for the Journal's prominence was that it represented a new field, appealingly located between disciplines as the Journal was between other sorts of periodical. In its postwar heyday, the history of ideas was not a dim subdivision of history, itself a discipline whose luster has worn off with time, but an intellectual seismic zone where the tectonic plates of disciplines converged and rubbed against one another, producing noises of all sorts. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed impossible, even to the best informed observers, that intellectual history, or the history of ideas, ever enjoyed this sort of prestige. A quarter century ago, Robert Darnton surveyed the state of intellectual and cultural history in the United States in an informative and influential essay. Using a language more resonant of the historical President Carter than the fictional President Robbins, Darnton detected "malaise" everywhere he looked. In the fifties, he noted, intellectual historians had seen "their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled." True, desperate cries for help were not yet called for. Historians continued to write histories of ideas, and even to cast them in the technical languages of A.O. Lovejoy or Perry Miller: "one still finds 'unit-ideas' and 'mind' among the trendier terms." The just-published Dictionary of the History of Ideas, moreover, offered a vast selection of Lovejoyan formal analyses, systematically organized, to the reading public.4 [End Page 2] But for the last ten years, Darnton argued, younger scholars, especially graduate students, had been scrambling over the gunwales of the good ship History of Ideas, abandoning the effort to converse abstractly with the mighty dead, and clambering in hordes over the side of a newer vessel, Social History, which boasted a Hogarthian passenger list of heretics, misfits, and military women. At the level of the dissertations written in history departments, social history was outpacing intellectual, by a proportion of three to one. At the level of the scholarly journal, too, social history had forged ahead, though by a smaller margin. In the murkier, but no less significant, world of opinion, finally, the decline of intellectual history appeared clearest. History of ideas no longer occupied the cutting edge in young scholars' mental vision of their discipline. Social history, after all, had captured the minds of a generation—or a large percentage of it—in the 1960s, thanks both to the power of...

The Transition from Sail to Steam in Immigration to the United States

The transition from sailing ship to steamship is analyzed for European immigrants arriving at New York City. Based on information taken from the U.S. Passenger Lists, new estimates of the timing and length of the transition are provided. Though the accepted model suggests the changeover from sail to steam could occur in only a few years, it actually took about 15 years in the Europe to New York immigrant trade. The slow transition is found to be due to slow construction of new steamships given uncertainty concerning immigrant volume and new steamship technology. The most important change in nineteenth century emigrant transportation was that from sail to steam. Gunter Moltmann Moltmann, “Steamship Transport,” p. 311. … the transition from sail to steam in the transatlantic immigrant trade was an event of enormous significance for the history of immigration . Maldwyn Allen Jones Jones, American Immigration , p. 157.

After the Hector: The Scottish Pioneers of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, 1733-1852 (review)

Reviewed by: After the Hector: The Scottish Pioneers of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, 1773-1852 Graeme Morton After the Hector: The Scottish Pioneers of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, 1773-1852. Lucille H. Campey. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2004. Pp. 376, illus. $27.95 This is the fourth book on the often dramatic story of emigrant Scots by Lucille H. Campey and it will soon be followed by a fifth. She has placed her focus on Scottish migration to Canada, and it is a topic filled with persuasive evidence of poverty and hardship combined with often incredible stories of communities recreated in a distant land. The research behind this study of the path-breaking ship The Hector, which brought the nearly two hundred first arrivals from Scotland to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton in 1773, and the migrations that followed, is the key element to this book. Campey impresses us with her work on Lloyds Shipping Register detailing the condition and cargo of the 213 ships (which she was able to identity) carrying timber and people between Scotland and Nova Scotia in this period, as well as bringing together the extant passenger lists for these ships (Appendix 1, 193 - 233), material that had otherwise appeared in a range of secondary sources. While giving due attention to the Highland clearances, especially from the Hebridean Islands and from Sutherland, Campey makes clear the importance of the 'pull' factors of migration. It was not just the 'push' from the land that set the migratory trail in motion, and indeed Campey explains that in the 1770s to 1790s the lairds were reluctant to lose their key economic resource, their tenants. The push from the land became more important in the nineteenth century, with the period of economic downturn after the Napoleonic War being particularly severe, as well as famine in 1846 - 7. The familiar story of sheep replacing tenants, and the initial success then failure of the kelp industry, were the main pressures in the decision to head for Canada. But Campey remains determined to explain the pull of trade and the prospect of economic prosperity, particularly through lumber exports from Nova Scotia. [End Page 389] Much of the analysis throughout the chapters then falls on the different destinations of Catholic and Presbyterian Scots upon arrival, both within the province and over to Cape Breton. We know that migrants tend to head for the destinations of kin and friends, but Campey shows that these recreated communities were divided by religion. We are also told that these migrants tended to arrive safely, a point made repeatedly throughout the chapters. Campey explains that conditions onboard the migrant ships were frequently fit for purpose and that the new arrivals were poor and hungry, and not likely to achieve the immediate rewards they hoped for - or were erroneously promised - but they were generally safe and well. The condition of the boats, from the evidence in Lloyds Shipping Register, makes chapter 9 the most impressive in the book. With the survey of these ships, Campey is able to conclude with confidence that 'the popular image of leaky and sub-standard vessels is simply not borne out by the evidence' (166). It deals with this one issue in a systematic way and with good illustrative case study material. The earlier chapters are not so discrete, and there the reader is lost in a wave of statements about which part of Nova Scotia or Cape Breton received its migrants from which part of Scotland. It was the kind of evidence best suited to one chapter, not spread among several, and best displayed by a series of maps and tables. Similarly the analyses around economic downturns, the timber trade, and the religious divide perpetuated by each new set of arrivals were repeated too often and to the detriment of other themes. Unfortunately the excellent primary and secondary researches were confined to the appendices and footnotes at the book's end, and while informing the narrative they received scant interrogation up-front. Thus we have an example of the desire to produce an accessible text undermining the power and the importance of the archival work that has undoubtedly been done. A reordering...

An analysis of changes in the characteristics of emigrating Farmers and Laborers from the Hamburg Passenger lists: 1855–1857, 1875–1877, and 1880

This study examines a sample from the Hamburg Emigration Lists in the years 1855–1857, 1875–1877, and 1880 to determine whether changing conditions that would affect expected net benefits of migrants wrought changes in the quantifiable characteristics of emigrating Farmers and Laborers. The analysis follows a human capital model of migration. The data present evidence of a decrease in the expected benefits among Farmers but weaker evidence for a decrease for Laborers.

The Fabric of Memory, Identity and Diaspora: An Irish Needlework Sampler in Australia with United States and Canadian Connections

Irish emigrants generally brought some material possessions with them from the ‘old world’ of Ireland to the ‘new world’ destinations of the Irish diaspora, but relatively few of them survive in museum collections or in private hands. Considering the modest economic status of most emigrants and the restricted circumstances of their journeys, this is hardly surprising. Typically, their physical baggage was not extensive, as we may see from ship passenger lists of the nineteenth century. For example, the 162 passengers on the Barque Fanny, which sailed from Londonderry to Philadelphia on 12 May 1845, had between them only 106 baggage items: fifty chests, twenty-nine boxes, fifteen trunks, nine barrels and three bundles. More than half (thirty-eight males, forty-five females) were travelling singly, rather than in a family group, and without any baggage at all.

The Kaprun cable car fire disaster—aspects of forensic organisation following a mass fatality with 155 victims

In November 2000, a tunnel-bound cable car in Kaprun caught fire, with the subsequent death of 155 persons. No passenger list was in existence and bodies were burnt to such an extent that morphological identification was not feasible. A full post-mortem examination was performed on all bodies. All bodies were positively identified within 19 days after the incident by DNA analysis. Cause of death was determined to be carbon monoxide poisoning in combination with suffocation due to inhalation of smoke. The organisational aspects of processing are portrayed.

Digital Imaging Methods as an Aid in Dental Identification of Human Remains

The physical comparison of known (K) and questioned (Q) evidence samples is an accepted tool in numerous forensic identification disciplines (1). A subset of this process is the use of antemortem and postmortem dental radiographs to identify unidentified human remains. This method has been generally accepted for decades (2). The outcome is performed with a considerable degree of accuracy, due in part to a finite pool of possible candidates for identification derived via the NCIC database, passenger lists, and law enforcement Missing Persons reports. This paper describes a dental identification comparison protocol that incorporated digital imaging technology in this process. The computer was used to create digital exemplars of the K and Q evidence that were spatially and quantitatively compared (3). The digital mode allowed direct metric and morphologic comparison through the aid of a digital camera, desktop computer, monitor, and printer. The well-known computer program Adobe Photoshop 5.0 (4) was used to process the digital information in two forensic cases described in this paper. It is a commercially available digital imaging editing program that is operated on laptop and desktop computers possessing sufficient chip speed and RAM (Pentium II or equivalent and at least 76MB RAM) to open the large-size files generated by high-resolution digital capture devices. This program accepts raster-based image formats (e.g. .JPG, .BMP). Photoshop is noted for its diverse imaging functions, which allow the computer monitor to be used as a comparison microscope when Q and K sample images are tiled side-by-side and/or superimposed. Two and three-dimensional Q and K evidence samples can be individually digitized and then independently resized to allow two-dimensional comparison. The investigator also has the ability to create magnified images (200% to 300%) when the original digital image has been captured at near photoquality resolution (300 dpi). The visual comparison of physical features on the computer monitor permits a large field of view and robust digital control over image quality. Photographic measurement and enhancement features of Adobe Photoshop mimics and in some circumstances surpasses the historic use of conventional photographic manipulation in forensic casework. This paper presents two cases processed via routine forensic odontology identification protocols. These protocols had minimal results due to limitations described in the case histories. The additional application of digital methods proved useful in the ultimate identification of these human remains.

Encyclopedia of local history

Encyclopedia of Local History. Edited by Carol Kammen and Norma Prendergast (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 539. Ill, appendices. Cloth, $79.95). This book will become an indispensable companion for anyone who reads this journal. Be they members of local historical societies working to preserve the remnants of the past, historians gathering materials from dusty courthouse records in preparation for writing a local history, family historians hoping to discover their roots, teachers assisting students to develop projects for history fairs, or librarians struggling to assist their patrons' search for ancestors-all will discover answers to practical how-to-do-it questions as well as essays designed to stimulate imaginations. What are Sanborn maps, and how can I find one of my community? This Encyclopedia of Local History will point the reader in the right direction. It also inspires the local historian to ask questions that might not have been imagined. What, for example, can culinary history contribute to understanding the life of a community? Or how do local historians in England, Scotland, or Nigeria pursue their craft? The encyclopedia works at several levels. For the researcher it provides a range of entries on source materials such as account books and court records, photographs and postcards, immigrant passenger lists and census materials. In addition to examining the uses and limitations of these sources, these entries point the reader to bibliographical materials, libraries and web sites. Family researchers will find helpful entries on such topics as the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, Jewish genealogy, and Afro-American genealogy. While the editors assign special entries for established research centers such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, and the Library of Congress, they are careful to include essential web sites as well. In their effort to anticipate the problems a researcher may confront, the editors have included useful legal definitions such as fee simple and entail as well as an essay on the Freedom of Information Act. For the prospective writer, there are entries on the editing and publishing of manuscripts. For those interested in museums there are several cross-referenced discussions on museums, living history museums, house museums, the ethics of museum work, and such special topics as repatriation and patrimony. This is an encyclopedia that is designed to provoke questions as much as answer them. The editors have solicited a wide range of essays on such subjects as the history of education, the American Indian, the environment, business, health care, toys, and etiquette to encourage local historians to expand their horizons. In that vein, Sharon Babaian invites readers to give more systematic attention to technology, and in doing so she offers helpful references to prospective researchers. The encyclopedia encourages local history that is truly democratic. Thus, it includes essays on American Indian, Chicano, Asian American as well as African American history and an invaluable appendix listing numerous ethnic groups with relevant bibliographical citations and websites. …

Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States

From 1820 to 1860, the United States and Great Britain were the two most closely interconnected countries in the world in terms of culture and economic growth. In an important addition to immigration history, William Van Vugt explores who came to America from Great Britain during this period and why. Disruptions and economic hardships, such as the repeal of Britain's protective Corn Laws, the potato famine, and technological displacement, do not account for the great mid-century surge of British migration to America. Rather than desperation and impoverishment, Van Vugt finds that immigrants were motivated by energy, tenacity, and ambition to improve their lives by taking advantage of opportunities in America. Drawing on county histories, passenger lists of immigrant ships, census data, and manuscript collections in Great Britain and the United States, Van Vugt sketches the lives and fortunes of dozens of immigrant farmers, miners, artisans, skilled and unskilled laborers, professionals, and religious nonconformists.

GEOMETRID MOTHS OF THE WORLD: A CATALOGUE. Edited by M. J. Scoble. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria. 1999. Pp. 1200 in 2 volumes plus CD-ROM. $US295.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0643 06034 8.

GEOMETRID MOTHS OF THE WORLD: A CATALOGUE. Edited by M. J. Scoble. CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria. 1999. Pp. 1200 in 2 volumes plus CD-ROM. $US295.00 (hardcover). ISBN 0643 06034 8.

Use of Radiographic Atlases in a Mass Fatality

In May and June of 1996, a forensic anthropology team from the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida identified 9 of 10 juveniles from the crash of ValuJet 592. The team relied primarily on a radiographic atlas developed and used by clinical practitioners to determine skeletal age. Postmortem radiographs of the juvenile victims were compared with radiographic standards to determine skeletal age. Skeletal age was then compared to a passenger list indicating the sex, weight, height, and chronological age of each individual. Tentative identifications based on the atlas method were organized into an exclusion matrix. Final identifications were based on this assessment in conjunction with other anthropological data such as appearance and fusion of ossification centers and estimation of stature.

Frederick Sandeman, a Foreign Teacher of English Studies

Many foreign teachers played important roles in modernizing Meiji Japan. Only a little has been clarified, however, about their lives and careers. This paper deals with Frederick Sandeman, an unfamiliar figure to Japanese people in general, and tries to investigate his life and work in the early Meiji period, making the most of the historical materials at hand.Sandeman worked for both national and semi-official schools : at Daigaku Nanko (the forerunner of Tokyo University) and at Miyazaki School of Foreign Languages in the Watarai Prefecture (the present Mie Prefecture).At Daigaku Nanko, he taught elementary English for six months, starting on 1st January 1871. During these months, he accidentally injured a child and an old man while passing along on his carriage. This may be the possible reason why he couldn't renew his contract unlike his colleagues.At Miyazaki School, he taught English for one year from 1st November 1874. He had six classes a day and was well paid under the 'Contract'. Some of the school budget including his salary came from the surplus of the revenues obtained from ferry service across the Miyagawa River. Quackenbos's First Lessons in Composition, The Illustrated London News and others were used as textbooks or supplementary readers, which indicates that English studies were taught rather than the English language itself. The rewarding system was adopted at this school, where Western books or bundles of machine-made paper were awarded to excellent students. While working at Miyazaki School, he enjoyed trips to various places and went as far as China.When he couldn't find any employment, he resided in the Yokohama Foreign Settlement and probably opened a private school to teach English. His interesting advertisements appeared in the local newspaper for about a month from 25th July 1871.According to the passenger lists in the newspapers, he reached Yokohama on the English ship “Lochnager” on 16th June 1870, and left Yokohama for Hongkong on the French steamship “Tanais” on 7th January 1877.

Migration-Related Resources on the World Wide Web

Angel Island: Life in Detainment . Often called the Pacific Gateway or the Island of the West, Angel Island was a stopping point for the majority of Asians who immi grated to the United States. The International Channel maintains this site, focusing on immigrants' experiences while detained at Angel Island. Separate pages address living conditions, medical examinations, and interrogation, while another investigates the poetry some immigrants carved into the walls of the facility. Angel Island: Stories, Photography, and Poetry: . This web site, sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, offers a look into the history of the island and into the experiences of those who traveled through it. It addresses such issues as the Open Door Policy, the Coolie trade, Asian railroad workers, and the virulent racism many Asian immigrants faced. Arduini and Pizzo: An Italian-American Family History: . A family's decision to rediscover its roots becomes an educational opportunity for all. Created by Frank Arduini in 1994, this site records the histories of the Arduini and Pizzo families?two Italian immigrant clans joined in marriage in 1947. Arduini includes over thirty stories and eighty photographs on his pages, offering a very personal view of what it is like to build lives and legacies in a new country. Ellis Island Photography, 19004920: . Part of the Keystone-Mast Collection of the California Museum of Photography, this site contains numerous photos taken at Ellis Island during the great waves of immigration in the early twentieth century. The collection includes images of the structure and makeup of the Ellis Island facility, as well as photos of immigrants undergoing various examinations and questioning. This site provides an excellent resource for jump-starting discussions on the immigrant experience. Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild: . Founded only a year ago, the Immigrant Ship Tran scribers Guild (ISTG) now has over five hundred volunteer members who translate, decipher, and transcribe the passenger lists of immi grant ships to the United States. Currently available online are the lists for nearly two thousand ships dating back as far as the mid 1600s. Teachers and students can easily navigate and search the site for names, dates, ports of departure, or ports of arrival. Learning About Immigration Through Oral History: . This lesson plan, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, uses the oral histories of contemporary immigrants in east central Illinois to teach students the process of historiography and give them an understanding of our nation's ethnic diversity. The plan uses selections from the American Memory online collection as well as print and video resources. The lesson can be geared toward high school or middle school classes, spans several curricular areas, and can comprise either a short unit or a semester-long study. Learning, and Earning, Their Stripes: . The text of this site originally appeared in the Washington Post in 1996. It includes an article describing the controversial process of U.S. citizenship testing and a list of one hundred questions that the Immigration and Naturalization Service gives prospective citizens to prepare for their naturalization exam. Having students take the test provides an nice introduction to issues of citizenship and immigration.

From the Editors

The award-winning film “Titanic” released in 1997 once again brought to our attention the problems associated with the lifeboat ethic. Stunned audiences everywhere witnessed the chaos on board as, by design, one-third fewer lifeboats were available than for the passenger list. Violence erupted in the competition for a disputed spot; heroism and altruism also abounded. Additionally, viewers of the movie witnessed efforts to cheat and the power of money in having a secret lifeboat for the rich. (A first-class cabin on that cruise cost the equivalent of $75,000 per person in today's money.)

Mary Farl Powers (1948–1992) American Person, Irish Artist

MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992) AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST KATHERINE ANNE POWERS MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992): AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST 157 figure 1 Mary Farl Powers (1977), photographed by Hugh Powers. (Courtesy of Powers family) I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit; thin as a rake, your hand moving in such a deliberate arc as you ground a lithographic stone that your hand and the stone blurred into one and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl, who took your failing, ink-stained hand in her failing, ink-stained hand and together you ground down that stone by force of will. from “Incantata” by Paul Muldoon, in memory of Mary Farl Powers MARY FARL POWERS (1948–1992): AMERICAN PERSON, IRISH ARTIST 158 my sister, Mary Farl Powers, who died in 1992, was an influential and innovative printmaker in Ireland (figure 1). She made etchings, lithographs, wood-block prints, and cast paper works. She was a founding member of the Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin, a director of the Graphic Studio, and member of aosdana where she served as a toscaire. In what follows I shall discuss her becoming and being an Irish artist. I should say right here that it is an odd thing for me to write about art at all—as my sister would have been quick to point out—because I cannot understand anything that is not written down. Fortunately, the Powers family was—and, to some extent, still is—made up of heroic letter writers with a strong archival bent. The collected family correspondence and assorted documentary “stuff” is voluminous; and the Mary Farl Powers section, for one, gives an excellent picture of the making of an artist. The correspondence also reveals what is surely a unique intersection of Irish and American life. Few people emigrated from the United States to Ireland in the 1950s as the Powers family did—quite the reverse, in fact. And I cannot think that anyone at all did it as often as we; for, despite the family’s growing population, we carried the project forward four times over the next quarter century—by which, I mean, the family and its earthly goods crossed the Atlantic eight times. I detached myself from this traveling show in 1969, and Mary did so in 1975, when she made Ireland her permanent home. Oddly—or maybe not, given the pull Ireland has on her most distant descendants—in journeying there the first time, we were not going “home” exactly. Our parents were fourth-generation Americans of Irish and German descent, with the latter somewhat predominating— though, to be sure, our father had always gone on about his fine “Norman brow,” inherited, presumably, from the de Paors of Waterford. Mary Farl Powers, born in 1948, a year after me, in St. Cloud, Minnesota , was the second of the five children of J.F. Powers and Betty Wahl Powers, both writers. Mary was a truly beautiful child with huge blue eyes, a froggy mouth, and an astringent nature, one not inclined toward meekness ; her earliest noteworthy act was to bite the hand of a priest. After moving around from this place to that in Minnesota and, finally, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the family—which then consisted of my parents, Mary, and me—moved to Ireland in 1951. The idea was that this move was a leap to a civilized country, to a better place, salutary to the life of the mind, friendly to writers, and free from the yammer and boosterism of post-war U.S.A. We sailed for Ireland from New York on 25 October 1951 aboard the S.S. America. I see that in the Passenger List, a cream-colored, deckle-edged booklet, we are listed as Mr. John Powers, Mrs. John Powers, Miss Catherine Ann Powers, and Miss Mary Powers, all but the last name being wrong. I’m sure my parents made a lot of this sloppiness; that it represented the overfamiliarity, clunkiness, and general obliviousness they thought they were escaping by leaving America. In Ireland things were not so great as had been hoped. The cold of our house in Greystones, County Wicklow, like that...

Migration from the Russian empire: lists of passengers arriving at the port of New York. v.1: January 1875-September 1882; v.2: October 1882-April 1886

Migration from the Russian empire: lists of passengers arriving at the port of New York. v.1: January 1875-September 1882; v.2: October 1882-April 1886

Lifting the Lid on Poe's "Oblong Box"

general indifference and lack curiosity with which most readers have reacted to The Oblong Box seems to defy a natural human impulse to uncover what is concealed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott's dismissal it as Poe's less successful tales horror(1) is characteristic a more widespread lack interest. Two recent discussions, however, which have drawn attention to the self-referential dimension The Oblong Box, have rescued the tale from undeserved obscurity.(2) Now that the nails have been drawn, it is time for a closer look at what has been packed away so long. My detailed examination seeks to demonstrate that, this story at least, self-referentiality and social or political statement were, for Poe, part the same exercise. Published 1844, The Oblong Box is the story a voyage by packet-ship, the Independence, from Charleston to New York. first-person narrator is pleased to see that the passenger list includes the name his university friend, the artist Cornelius Wyatt, who is traveling with his bride and his two sisters. Most the narrator's attention is taken up by the question why Wyatt has reserved three state-rooms for his party four, and with speculations about the contents the six by two and a half foot box that Wyatt keeps his state-room. After several days, the ship founders a storm off Cape Hatteras and Wyatt leaps from a lifeboat, swims back to the ship, and retrieves the box. He then lashes himself to it, jumps overboard, and disappears beneath the waves. When the narrator remarks on how suddenly they sank, the captain cryptically replies, They will soon rise again... but not till the salt melts (p. 933). A month later, the narrator meets the captain on Broadway, who informs him that the box contained the salted-down corpse Wyatt's adored wife, who died the morning before the scheduled departure. extra state-room was for her lady's-maid, who impersonated her on the voyage for the benefit the passengers, nine tenths them, who would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead (p. 933). This explanation does nothing to calm the narrator, who has been moody, nervous, and insomniac throughout the voyage. Haunted by Wyatt's hysterical laugh (p. 934), which he provoked by ill-judged witticisms about the contents the box, he concludes by complaining that of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night (p. 934). Packing his wife's body in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements (p. 856) was one the expedients considered by the protagonist The Black Cat, published the preceding year. idea, both stories, may have derived from a notorious New York murder. In 1841 John Colt, brother the inventor the Colt rifle, quarrelled with the printer Samuel Adams over a payment for books and killed him an apartment on Broadway and Chambers Street. He then disposed the body by packing it salt an oblong box and sending it on board the Kalamazoo at its Maiden Lane pier. Convicted and condemned, Colt further confirmed his place the annals criminal history by marrying and committing suicide prison the day he was scheduled to hang, November 1842.(3) So sensational was this murder that Herman Melville, alluding to it Bartleby more than ten years later, was able to rely on his readers' recollection the details. When Poe's boxed edition this murder, marriage, and suicide formula was published 1844, the incident was still very fresh the public mind. interest the story for Poe, as for Melville, however, was not simply the lurid aspects the case, which captured the popular imagination, but its connection with the passions and economics the contemporary New York publishing world. Poe's associate Rufus Griswold, whose intense and troubled relationship with Poe started 1841, began his career as a printer, like Colt's victim, Adams. …