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Domesticating The Diaspora: Memory And The Life Of Sister Katie, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Domesticating The Diaspora: Memory And The Life Of Sister Katie, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Caroline Merithew
Three shrines in Illinois honor heroes of the working class: one for the legendary Mother Jones; one for the Virden martyrs, who died for coal mining unionism, and whose memory is kept alive by labor organizers around the world; and one for Catherine (Katie) Bianco DeRorre. Katie's monument, unlike the others, draws few visitors today. But when it was dedicated in 1961, men and women — on the floor of the U.S. Congress, in the neighborhood where Katie grew up, at American universities, in union halls, on the streets of New York City, and in Milan — took notice and …
Making The Italian Other: Blacks, Whites, And The In Between In The 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois, Race Riot, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Making The Italian Other: Blacks, Whites, And The In Between In The 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois, Race Riot, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Caroline Merithew
This essay takes the Spring Valley, Illinois, race riot and observes how blacks, Italians, and other new immigrants attempted to empower themselves and lay claim to status at the "nadir" of race relations ill this country. The events leading up to the riot, the assault on the African-American community, and the aftermath of the attack led to vocal outcries against oppression. What constituted oppression, however, was open to interpretation. Furthermore, no group defined itself, or its other, in isolation. Rather, each side responded to the rhetoric of its "opponents" as well as of middle-class whites who became involved in the …
Navigating Body, Class, And Disability In The Life Of Agnes Burns Wieck, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Navigating Body, Class, And Disability In The Life Of Agnes Burns Wieck, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Caroline Merithew
The concerns expressed in Burns Wieck’s letter to Hapgood typify many of the issues that occupied her during the course of her life. She, like many Americans in the early twentieth century, thought that there were economic disparities as well as great cultural divisions between the working and middle classes in a capitalist system. Burns Wieck worried about how nature and environment shaped physical and emotional existence for her as a woman and as a worker.4 A question she asked about childbirth in her letter—“Why, oh why, can’t they find some way to humanize that experience?”—is one that she might …
Sister Katie: The Memory And Making Of A 1.5 Generation Working Class Transnational, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Sister Katie: The Memory And Making Of A 1.5 Generation Working Class Transnational, Caroline Waldron Merithew
Caroline Merithew
Identifying the theoretical and chronological fault lines that divide immigration and women’s history, I use memory and biography to argue that assimilation and transnationalism in the 1.5 and second generations were not oppositional. In this article, I tell the story of an Italian immigrant who moved to the United States as a young child and who became a self-proclaimed “left winger.” I cast Katie’s story less from her own words as from the recollections of others who remade and remembered her from the 1930s until 1960. I argue that a working-class transnational’s identity was one that could move through large …