Migrant Knowledge

Migrant Knowledge

Tag: 1900s

Looks at the ethnic, cultural, and economic factors that drove the development of Wurstfest, one of the biggest German ethnic festivals in the United States.

Wurstfest: A Culinary, Cultural, and Economic Masterpiece

Aiden Maliskas and Mark McShane

Bohemian immigrant Anton Schwarz impacted brewing knowledge and practice in the US by introducing knowledge from Germany, especially. He founded the US Brewers' Academy and introduced brewing with adjuncts.

Migration and the Transatlantic Circulation of Brewing Knowledge: The Case of Anton Schwarz

Recounts the flooding of Vanport, Oregon, in 1948, the displacement of the city's residents, and the memory culture around this event.

Migration, Displacement, and Memory in Vanport, Oregon (1942–2023)

Presents the knowledge the German news agency Agencia Duems disseminated in Mexico and Germany about the other country, respectively.

Between Germany and Mexico: Agencia Duems and the Production of Knowledge

Itzel Toledo García

Looks at travelogues and guidebooks available in two Baden libraries in the 1890s to determine the knowledge of the USA, and particularly of American women, presented therein.

‘Plant-like Women and Luxury Wives’—American Women in Nineteenth-century German Travelogues and Guides

Marie Nella Hoffmann

Demonstrates how Chinese immigrants to Peru utilized their knowledge of its culture and aspirations in constructing the fountain to improve their standing.

The Chinese Fountain: Migrant Knowledge and World-Making in Early Twentieth-Century Peru

West German experts emphasized cultural otherness as an impediment to the employment—and "emancipation"—of Turkish migrant women instead of attending to the women's testimony about the practical impediments they faced in a system built on the unpaid labor of housewives.

Knowledge about the ‘Migrant Woman’ as an Alibi for State Inaction in the Federal Republic of Germany

Paul Lerner, Uwe Spiekermann, and Anne Schenderlein have a new book, Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave, 2022).

New Book from the Network: Jewish Consumer Cultures

What migrants relay about a host country to their country of origin is shaped by competing pressures that transform knowledge. The reports of two London-based correspondents to prerevolutionary Russia illustrate this point.

Between Fact and Fiction: The Fabrication of Migrant Knowledge in Professional and Personal Correspondence

Anna Vaninskaya

Irawati Karve earned her doctorate in interwar Berlin before returning to India, where she pursued a career in anthropology. Discussing her work is difficult because she both rejected and adopted claims from the now infamous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.

The Contradictions of Irawati Karve: A Conversation

Thiago Pinto Barbosa
Urmilla Deshpande

Emil Trinkler didn't migrate as such, but Marjan Wardak's article speaks to central themes on this blog. People and knowledge itself are on the move, interacting with go-betweens and yielding something new.

The Scientist Emil Trinkler’s Exploration across South Asia, 1915–1933

The author discusses the source value of U.S. immigrant newspapers. If there are many reasons to approach them with caution, they can still help scholars learn "what migrants knew and wanted their fellow migrants to know..."

Transatlantic Migrants and Knowledge in the U.S. Immigrant Press

Kristina E. Poznan

W. F. Whyte's 'Street Corner Society' became a popular text for sociology students, but specialists in Italian American studies never warmed to it. Donna Gabaccio explains why with "a hidden history of gender and ethnic dynamics" in the academy.

‘The Book That Would Not Die’

Donna R. Gabaccia

New book: Jan Jansen and Simone Lässig, eds., Refugee Crises, 1945-2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison, Cambridge University Press 2020.

New Book from the Network: Refugee Crises, 1945–2000

A book for children about young refugees in New York was rooted in real experiences. Its author's eye for children's agency can help us to understand refugee children as go-betweens in wartime New York.

Young Refugees and Knowledge in New York during World War II: The Example of Babette Deutsch’s ‘The Welcome’

Protestant missionary schools affected the construction of "indigenous knowledge" in complex ways, including through their role in the emergence of local go-betweens, who carried this knowledge into colonial contexts.

The Formation of Indigenous Knowledge in Protestant Mission Schools, 1900–1930

Elisabeth Engel

Glenn Penny highlights aspects of children's go-between role in Chile not visible in histories of European migration to the United States. German schools in Chile and teachers posted there from Germany are central to this multigenerational story.

Routes of Knowledge: Growing up German in Chile, 1900–50

Germans translated Buddhist texts in Germany, and they migrated to British Ceylon in order to get closer to Buddhism. Their Buddhist practices ended up changing Buddhism's relationship to texts in their South Asian home.

German Migrants and the Circulation of Buddhist Knowledge between Germany and British Ceylon

Sebastian Musch