New Feature: Letter of the Month
• Washington, August 19, 2020 •
Our new Letter of the Month feature, which we're introducing today, highlights a particular letter from the collections that make up German Heritage in Letters. Our goal is both to share the individual family stories found in our letters and provide the historical context behind the text. We look forward to sharing letters that will shed light on topics from the state of the economy to religious traditions to ideas about gender and reactions to important events. We also hope that the feature will encourage new contributors to come forward with their own letters which will help contribute to a historical record that might otherwise be forgotten.
Our August 2020 Letter of the Month is drawn from a collection of family letters contributed by Ruth Emmel. It was written in August 1927 and sent by Caroline Emmel of Wiesbaden to her son, Kurt Emmel, in Wisconsin. The letter was the last written before Caroline and her husband Wilhelm immigrated to the United States, and the essay, written by project intern Isaiah Thompson, examines how this letter fits into the history of the German economy in the years following World War I.
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The Emmel family in Wisconsin, c. 1937. |
First page of Emmel letter |