Reviewed by: From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 by Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly Laura A. Detre Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly, From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2017. 354 pp. In recent years, immigration has again become a political flashpoint, with some Americans demanding a curtailment to both legal and illegal immigration and others lionizing immigrants as the backbone of our nation. Against that backdrop, Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly's book From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations is a timely examination of another period in our history when the migration of people in and out of the United States was of profound importance—the years at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, up to the First World War. Specifically, these three scholars examine the movement of people out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the experience of these migrants after arriving in the United States. Their work is an in-depth examination of many of the classic sources used by immigration scholars, such as census records and ship manifests, but what sets it apart from previous work in this field is the way they approach that material. Their interpretations make this book an innovation as well as enjoyable reading. What sets this work apart from others on the history of migration is the authors' focus on the transatlantic nature of life for many migrants. These were not the immigrants of American mythology, seeking out the one and only country where their miserable lives could be transformed. The migrants depicted here are laborers, tempted by high wages in American factories, who [End Page 111] always intended to return to Europe and, in many cases, did exactly that. As these migrants did not see themselves as new Americans, they resisted assimilation and it was only after many years (and in some cases several generations) that they became integrated into wider American society. This is a fundamental change in the way that historians approach immigration history, moving away from the idea that migrants were transplanted people looking for new homes and toward a view of them as genuinely transnational people who lived their lives deeply connected to multiple cultures and, therefore, many identities. Focusing on return migration requires a deep understanding, not just of North America and the contexts that immigrants found themselves in upon their arrival in a new home but also the societies that emigrants were leaving and, in many cases, returning to after extended absences. This expertise is not common among historians, in part because we tend to limit our study along national lines, but the transnational focus that Steidl, Fischer-Nebmaier, and Oberly have adopted is the strength of their project. Of course, their transnational view of migration is enhanced (or perhaps required) because the people they were studying originated in a multiethnic empire. This study does not simply focus on German-speaking Austro-Hungarians or even the people of Cisleithania. The authors of this work recognize, as so few historians have before now, that despite the multiplicity of languages, religions, and cultural traditions, the people of Austria-Hungary shared a political history, an aspect that earlier research has neglected. They assert, with strong evidence to back their claim, that emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not see themselves exclusively as Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and so on but also as interconnected subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. The authors go even further, suggesting that the ethnic identities ascribed to the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, either in their place of birth or later as emigrants, are not necessarily categories that would have had meaning for these migrants. Or, at least, these categories were malleable and held different meanings depending on the context. Did ethnic identification become more central in the lives of immigrants to the United States as a means of coping with old-stock Americans? Also, studies that focus narrowly on ethnicity often overlook the role of social class in an immigrant's construction of...
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Jan 1, 2023
Caroline Pari 
Open Access