Cracking Naphegyi’s Code: Deciphering the Cryptic Papers of a ’48-er (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Gábor Naphegyi occupies an odd space in Hungarian-American history, at once present in several historical publications but still fundamentally mysterious. By some counts he seems to have made his way from the Hungarian army to Hamburg to the United States in early 1849, while the revolution of 1848 still continued. Preceding the rise of mass transatlantic migration, migrants of Naphegyi’s ’48-er cohort migrated the globe to some diverse places. In his convoluted and storied life, Naphegyi was a doctor, author, scientist, linguist, businessman, insurance agent, and revolutionary in various locales in North America, all the while a conman, counterfeit artist. Naphegyi’s North American travels spanned the political boundaries of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, benefitting from porous borders on both sides of the Atlantic. His life illuminates global mobility in the post-revolutionary decades and the enduring privilege of an elevated class status as a member of the intelligentsia, even in the era of the so-called "self-made man."
Two boxes of Naphegyi’s papers, housed at Yale University, contain documents in several languages, as well as telegraph ticker tape and a cipher seemingly of his own devising. This paper will explore the author’s attempts at making sense of this odd, cryptic, and multilingual archive.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Kristina E. Poznan, PhD, is a scholar of American migration and foreign relations history. Her work examines the relationship between transatlantic migration, migrant identities, and separatist nationalism in the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the context of migration to the United States. From 2017 to 2019 she was editor of Journal of Austrian-American History, sponsored by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and published by Penn State University Press. She is currently a clinical assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland and the managing editor of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, the journal of Enslaved.org.