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Personal Names and Cultural Change: A Study of the Naming Patterns of Italians and Jews in the United States in 1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Susan Cotts Watkins  and
Andrew S. London
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Extract

Although individual and personal, names take on their significance in social interaction. Since the context of social interaction changes with immigration, names can be expected to change as well. In this paper, we use information from the Public Use Sample of the 1910 U.S. census to compare the patterns of personal (given) names of first- and second-generation Italian and Jewish immigrants and native-born whites of native parentage, and to examine the association of naming patterns of immigrants with several measures indicating interaction with those outside the ethnic group. Because the information from the census is at a single point in time, we also draw on interviews with elderly Italian and Jewish women in order to provide more direct evidence of change and of the contexts in which this change occurred.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 169 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

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