Trick or Treat?

Halloween postcard, ca. 1900-1910.

Kevin Kenny

Halloween is a Celtic festival, imported to America, and later re-exported to Europe, pumpkins and all.

The word Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Evening—the eve of All Hallows Day (or all Saints Day) Day. October 31 tends to be a boisterous occasion, whether in Boston (even without the World Series) or in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, where it kicks off the festival of el dia de los muertos.

In the Christian calendar, All Hallows Day, on November 1, was the day to remember saints and martyrs. All Souls Day, on November 2, was dedicated to all the departed faithful awaiting entry into heaven and hence in need of prayer.

As with most Christian holidays, the Church carefully overlaid the “days of the dead” on top of an earlier pre-Christian festival. Just as Christmas marks the winter solstice and Easter the onset of spring, Halloween was timed to coincide with a Celtic festival celebrating the end of the harvest.

The Protestant English overlaid a different holiday on the old harvest festival. They celebrated, and continue to celebrate, Guy Fawkes Night, the anniversary of a foiled attempt to blow up parliament on November 5, 1605. This holiday caught on in colonial New England, where Halloween was not widely celebrated until the onset of mass Catholic immigration in the mid-19th century.

Diaspora: A Useful Idea

Kevin Kenny*

The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean? 

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived

outside the biblical land of Israel.”

A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement,
Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of
the New York Public Library.

By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion.

Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group that moves from one place to another.

The key period of expansion in the usage of diaspora was the half-century after World War II. The reasons are not hard to find. During the era of decolonization, globally scattered populations of African origin forged new transnational bonds of solidarity. Migrant and ethnic communities of Asian origin (e.g., ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Vietnam or South Asians in East Africa) were expelled from their adopted countries. Global migration assumed a massive new scale. And the international recognition of refugees brought new attention to involuntary migration in particular.