OUT of the torrential influx of nineteenth-century Europeans into America, the greatest population movement in all history, came an extensive literature of immigrant accounts portraying the new Americans’ first contact with American society and their early efforts at integration. In the 1820’s, when the flow of immigration was still small, two Swiss immigrant families wrote accounts of what seemed to them to be the most decisive experiences of their lives. These particular accounts relate to a period in the history of American immigration that is less well known than the more spectacular colonial and post-Civil War movements. They are particularly...

SINCE the world-famous sailor Columbus,* after countless difficulties, dangers, suffering, and sickness of all kinds, happily sighted and discovered the other hemisphere of our earth, the younger sister, America, has become more and more familiar to the elder one and a more intimate friend. Many were spurred on by the desire to see the fresh, enchanting, blooming daughter across the sea, and did see her. Difficult travels by land and sea did not hold back the foot eager to wander. What cannot man dare and endure?! Not infrequently, the amount of money available for travel greatly affected the outcome. Many...

What new things have been happening there? How are all of you, my friends? Ah, these are questions which I would like answered all at once. But distant lands and seas separate us. The sounds of our words disappear in the valleys and heights, streams and rivers, broad and inhabited plains, high cliffs and castle ruins, the mirror of the ocean and its foamy waves, and are so long delayed that they seem like the tales of antiquity.

Formerly, when I wrote to my friends, it was from Wildhaus or Hemberg, but now it is from America that I write....