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From the Old Country: An Oral History of European Migration to America. Edited by Bruce M. Stave and John F. Sutherland, with Aldo Salerno. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England. 1999. Pp. XX, 284. $19.95 paper.)
This engaging book by Bruce M. Stave and John F. Sutherland, in collaboration with Aldo Salerno, offers vivid, first-person accounts of the lives of European immigrants in Connecticut in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The text is composed of extracts from oral history interviews conducted in the ig7os and 198os and selections from Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews from the Depression as well as the editors' introductory comments. Although the volume does not revise many common ideas about immigration-in fact, it does not attempt to do so-it does raise some interesting questions and offers valuable illustrations of the day-to-day experiences of immigrant life. Students and general readers are especially likely to benefit from this paperback edition of a book originally published in hardcover in 1994.
Between 1938 and 1940 the Ethnic Group Survey of the WPA interviewed a number of immigrants to Connecticut along with some of their children. Most of Connecticut's foreign-born population in the late 193os hailed from southern and eastern Europe, although it was still possible to find immigrants from central Europe, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. The aim of the interviews was to capture the flavor...