During her lifetime, Elise Tvede Waerenskjold achieved fame as a “father” of Norwegian emigration for her editing of the pro-emigration journal Norway and America and her publishing, both in Norway and the U.S., of many letters encouraging her compatriots to make the long voyage from Norway to settle in Texas. Waerenskjold’s letters represent a body of persuasive documents that I refer to as emigration propagation. Emigration propagation, generally, and Waerenskjold’s letters, in particular, reveals the persuasive strategies that entreated many millions to cross the Atlantic and begin new lives in a new place so far from home.

Social settlements established in the United States in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were important sites of literacy sponsorship for immigrant families. In Texas settlement houses differed from their larger Eastern and Midwestern counterparts in that they were founded against a backdrop of often angry anti-Mexican sentiment and in a region in which the white settlers themselves were often the more recent immigrants. An understanding of these differences contributes to a more complete picture of the varieties of social settlement experiments and their literacy practices in the United States.

In the decades after the American Revolution, orthodox Calvinists, followers of the New Divinity, attempted to preserve their vision of an orderly American society. These educated clergymen believed that American democracy could only survive, and survive as a citadel of Christian orthodoxy, if the nation checked populist impulses. Calvinist divines overlooked traditional Protestant scruples, embracing classical culture as a model for the American republic. The Calvinist clergy, better educated in the classics than almost any group in America, hoped to influence the national character of the young republic and to shore up their declining influence in public life by advocating a Christianized form of neoclassical oratorical culture.