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Guide
Books
Immigrants
usually left behind a cultural milieu that had prepared them not
just for the wealth of opportunity in the New World, but also for
the high human cost of access to it. The immigrants' dreams were
fired by images such as snatches of wondrous descriptions in letters
from Canada; he absorbed details from ethnic newspapers published
in North America, glossy advertisements, and guide books - these
last almost always written by those who claimed to be either experts
or reliable compatriots of the emigrants.
The
guides, dictionaries, phrasebooks, letter writing manuals and handbooks
published under ethnic auspices were not necessarily free of ideology
or commercial motives; they do though, bring into print the cautionaries,
lore, and concerns born of the genre's long tradition and immigrant's
harsh experiences. To complete our picture of the emigrant's cosmos,
an analysis of the written word's effect on the emigrant's decision
to migrate and his vision of North America needs to be added to
the anthropological dimension.
(Edited
excerpt from the Introduction in Polyphony (Guide Books).
Written by Robert F. Harney.)
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