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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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