Welsh Journals

his day. He succeeded John Morgan (1735-89) as professor of medical practice there, and was regarded by his contemporaries as being of an original mind and of wide medical interests. Amongst these, he wrote on the effects of arsenic on cancer. Interestingly, the reputation of Benjamin Rush, regarded highly in his own day, did not last long. Shryock regards him 'as one of the last leaders of a medicine not entirely divested of the mediaeval tradition; while the next generation witnessed a metamorphosis of this old art into a modern science'. The Evans remedies must also be seen in this context. The book was previously published in Welsh in 1992 as Cyfrinach Wncwl Daniel. It was a better title. JOHN CULE Cardiff WALES IN AMERICA: SCRANTON AND THE WELSH, 1860-1920. Studies in Welsh History. Vol. 8. By Williams D. Jones. University of Wales Press, Cardiff. 1993. Pp. xxii, 280. £ 20.00. WELSH WOMEN: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WOMEN IN WALES AND WOMEN OF WELSH DESCENT IN AMERICA. By Constance Wall Holt. Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, New Jersey, and London, 1993. Pp. xxv, 834. £ 69.50. When American industry began to suck in skilled labour across the 'craft corridor' of the Atlantic Ocean in the second half of the nineteenth century, Welsh workers were among those who, temporarily or permanently, glimpsed the American Dream and redefined themselves as immigrants. William D. Jones's remarkable book peels back, one after another, the layers of that immigrant experience and reveals how, within the space of sixty years, a Welsh community was both built and dismantled, and how its ethnicity shaped its response to life in the New World, and conditioned the forms taken by its acculturation into American society. Written throughout in sparkling prose, the book tackles issues of enormous complexity with impressive lucidity. At its core lies the question of what happens to a cultural identity when it is uprooted and transplanted in a different soil. The answers which the author provides do not always make for comfortable reading. The text falls into three parts. In the first, the anthracite mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the most Welsh of all American communities then or since, is vividly brought to life. In this raw, dusty, noisy place, a Babel's Tower of European languages, Welsh immigrants climbed the workplace hierarchy to dominate the labour aristocracy of managers and supervisors. From this vantage point they were able to participate in their new social world. Politically, they were drawn into the orbit of the Republican Party and, with the brief but violent exception of the period of the 1871 strike, held there. Hostility to other ethnic groups, particularly the largely unskilled and Catholic Irish, also defined their relations with such labour organizations as the Knights of Labour. Culturally, the establishment of the Welsh Philosophical Society marked the emergence of an elite, a community leadership that sought to impose its control and its self-image on the remainder. But, most significantly, their social