PUBLICATIONS

A Transatlantic Experience: The book describes the transatlantic experience of migrants from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary who arrived in the US from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of WWI. Traditional assumptions of mass migration - such as the rapid and easy Americanization of newly arriving Europeans, as well as their strong desire of retaining as much of native culture as possible - have been challenged by recent historical studies.

Results have been published from research carried in the project Understanding the Migration Experience: The Austrian-American Connection, 1870-1914, conducted by Annemarie Steidl and for Difference in the City in 2010 at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. The study

Annemarie Steidl and Wladimir Fischer. “Transatlantischer Heiratsmarkt und Heiratspolitik von MigrantInnen aus Österreich-Ungarn in den USA, 1870–1930.” L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 25, no. 1 (2014): 51–68.

This text is the outcome of the extensive archival studies in Minnesota, at the Immigration History Research Archive (IHRC) in Minneapolis and the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) archives in St. Paul. It uses the unpublished recorded memories of a Croat migrant from Austria Hungary in order to discuss basic questions of the analysis of ego documents, self representation in memoirs and the influence of intermediary tradition.

This publication of 2005 was the first published text on the project about migrants from predominantly South Slavic speaking regions to Vienna around 1900. It contains many basic considerations, an evaluation of the state of the art and discusses possible research strategies. The state of the art section was criticized because it did not include some of the most important quantitative research on migrants to Vienna. This critique was appreciated and later texts did incorporate this literature.