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Title: Moving beyond Rags to Riches: New York's Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: Counsel for Emigrants, first published in 1834, was one of many guidebooks written to satisfy the demand for reliable information on the conditions facing immigrants in Canada and the United States. Yet the first edition, which contained extracts from dozens of glowing letters written by people who had relocated to North America, met with skepticism. Were immigrants exaggerating their success to justify their decision to leave Europe? Could life in North America really be so good? When the guidebooks anonymous author issued a new edition four years later, he decided to address those questions. He related the story of an Irish immigrant who wrote a letter home bragging that he was doing so well in America that he could now afford to eat meat twice a week, far more often than he had in Ireland. When his employer saw the letter, he asked the immigrant why he did not tell the truth, which was that he now ate meat every day of the week, . . . three times a-day. The immigrant replied that his friends would disbelieve all he had said in the letter if he had told them that. Letters extolling the virtues of America were reliable, the author of Counsel for Emigrants insisted, because immigrants had just as many reasons to understate their success in the New World as to exaggerate it.
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Authors: Anbinder, Tyler
Periodical (Full): Journal of American History
Issue: 3
Volume: 99
Pages: 741-770
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare
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