The material for North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries has been selected from a wide range of sources with the assistance of our editorial board and advice from customers. The following general criteria have been used:
- The focus of the collection is the late nineteenth century.
- We have selected approximately 2,000 political cartoons that reflect immigration from this time period.
- We have attempted to balance the various cultural groups and provide representative works from each.
- The collection includes approximately 5,000 pages of Emigrant Guides and advice books for immigrants.
Here are the members of our editorial board:
Joel Wurl is Curator & Assistant Director of the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center, where he has worked since 1985. He is an advisor to public programs, exhibits, and historical preservation projects and has presented and and published research on several topics related to immigration and the preservation of documentary resources.
Joel has led seminars and workshops on both archival and immigration-related topics and has spoken to a diverse array of community audiences on the immigrant experience in America and, particularly, in the state of Minnesota. He currently serves as a board member for the International Institute of Minnesota and the Ironworld Discovery Center. Wurl was elected this year to the Society of American Archivists council and has served the Midwest Archives Conference as a council member and as editor of its journal Archival Issues. He is a co-author of The Immigration History Research Center: A Guide to Its Holdings and has written related articles for a number of publications
Currently serving as the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, Dr. Diner is a specialist in immigration and ethnic history, American Jewish history and the history of American women. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1976.
Her publications include: In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935; Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century; and A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880, all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
More recently she has completed work on Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America, published by the Princeton University Press in 2000, and Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in their Age of Migration, published by Harvard University Press in 2001.
Donna R. Gabaccia is the Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of many books and articles about Italian migration around the world and about immigrant women and immigrant life in the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1979.
Dr. Gabaccia’s newest book, Immigration and American Diversity was published in January, 2002, by Blackwell Publishers. A new collection of essays, co-edited with Franca Iacovetta, and titled Women, Gender and Transnational Life: Italian Workers of the World, is published by the University of Toronto Press. She is also the author of From Sicily to Elizabeth Street, Militants and Migrants; From the Other Side; and We Are What We Eat, Ethnic Food and the Making of America.
An archivist, librarian, and writer, Sal Gerea specializes in ethnic and multicultural archives. He received the MLS from the University of Arizona, where his emphasis was in library services to Latinos and library administration. Currently he is Director of the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, in the Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, he headed the Coleccin Tloque Nahuaque (Chicano research library) in that institution. He also teaches a course on documentary research methods in the Department of Chicano Studies. While with the Santa Barbara Public Library System (1980-1983) he directed the system's multicultural outreach program and managed one its branch libraries.
Mr. Gerea is a past president of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish Speaking. He has been on the governing Council of the ALA and chaired various ALA committees including the Reference and Adult Services Division's Committee on Library Services to the Spanish-speaking, the American Libraries Advisory Committee, and he has served on several ALA Presidential Program planning committees.
His publications include several books and numerous articles in the field of library science, bibliography, and in archives. His latest edited books include Latino Librarianship: A Handbook for Professionals (McFarland, 1990), Latino Periodicals: A Selection Guide (McFarland, 1998), and Library Services to Latinos: an Anthology (McFarland, 2000).
Currently Director of the Smithsonian Institutions Asian Pacific American Program, Franklin Odo's academic background was in traditional Asian Studies, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became part of the movement that created Asian American and other ethnic studies in California.
Since then he has taught at the University of Hawaii and at many other colleges and universities, including a college in Japan and at the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter College, Princeton, and Columbia University. Aside from his work as a curator and APAP director at the Smithsonian, Odo currently teaches a course in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland.
Dr. Odo is the editor of The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience, published by Columbia University Press. His previous books include A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawai‘i and Roots: An Asian American Reader, co-edited with Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, and Buck Wong