Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan is a monumental and pathbreaking study of early Irish Protestant and Catholic migration to America. Through exhaustive research and sensitive analyses of the letters, memoirs, and other writings, the authors describe the variety and vitality of early Irish immigrant experiences, ranging from those of frontier farmers and seaport workers to revolutionaries and loyalists. Largely through the migrants own words, it brings to life the networks, work, and experiences of these immigrants who shaped the formative stages of American society and its Irish communities. The authors explore why Irishmen and women left home and how they adapted to colonial and revolutionary America, in the process creating modern Irish and Irish-American identities on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan was the winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences, American Council on Irish Studies.

Two centuries of Irish emigration to the U.S. are portrayed through rare photos and the letters of emigrants writing of their New World experiences.

Explains the reasons for the large Irish emigration, and examines the problems they faced adjusting to new lives in the United States.

Born in Tipperary, Ireland at the end of the great famine, Richard T. Kennedy was the eighth child in a country family that survived the tragedies of the time. At the age of 15, he began saving letters written to him, and throughout his lifetime he stashed away a total of 52. ?These letters, as well as family records and lore, are the backbone of this book that chronicles his life story. The letters are a language of feeling; the living voice of the writer is present and transmits a certain energy. ?A story emerges from the letters which span almost 60 years. Beginning with his teenage years in Ireland, the narrative traces Richard’s path of emigration and discovery of new life in North America. ?It follows his career and home life in the San Francisco Bay Area, his travels and family events. ?The book also tracks the stories of his brothers. ?The eldest, Michael, immigrated to Australia with his young bride, opened his own retail store, survived the depression and relocated to Perth with his wife and nine children. ?The middle brother, Thomas, was an Irish farmer engaged in the extraordinary events of the late 1800s; he raised his five children on the family farm in Tipperary. ?Their letters crossed thousands of miles to keep faraway siblings up to date about family and local news, but also to give direction to life and reinforce family tradition and upbringing. ?The writers describe not just relationships to place but also relationships with each other; they tell us what they found and what they lost. ? Taking account of the political climate of their time and the particular challenges each one faced, Dear Richard shows how each brother navigated his own life course from humble beginnings to unimagined destinies. ?The character and accomplishments of each one are revealed, these sons of Eire who never lost their Irish soul, as well as the preeminence of family in Gaelic culture. ?To this day the letters nourish their descendents, connected again through this story.

A three-dimensional book featuring images and documents of Irish immigrants.

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters, i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech, and hence their written form of language, does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore, the writers of the emigrant letters, examined in the current volume, were very unlikely to have known of, still less have used, manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Families, Lovers, and their Letters takes us into the passionate hearts and minds of ordinary people caught in the heartbreak of transatlantic migration. It examines the experiences of Italian migrants to Canada and their loved ones left behind in Italy following the Second World War, when the largest migration of Italians to Canada took place. In a micro-analysis of 400 private letters, including three collections that incorporate letters from both sides of the Atlantic, Sonia Cancian provides new evidence on the bidirectional flow of communication during migration. She analyzes how kinship networks functioned as a means of support and control through the flow of news, objects, and persons; how gender roles in productive and reproductive spheres were reinforced as a means of coping with separation; and how the emotional impact of both temporary and permanent separation was expressed during the migration process. Cancian also examines the love letter as a specific form of epistolary exchange, a first in Italian immigrant historiography, revealing the powerful effect that romantic love had on the migration experience.