Abstract
The article presents a comparative analysis of two corpora of non-elite correspondence produced in the 19th-century United States: letters written by Polish emigrants in 1890–1891, collected by Kula, Assorodobraj-Kula, and Kula (2019), and letters written by American Civil War privates (Private Voices). Alongside selected dialectal and vernacular features, the study focuses primarily on epistolary practices reflected in the organisation of letters and recurrent opening and closing formulae. Differences between the corpora (most notably the greater prominence of religious references in the letters written by Polish emigrants) are treated as contextually determined rather than as a primary analytical finding. The analysis points to similarities in the composition and functional organisation of the correspondence under study, alongside these contextually grounded differences. These findings suggest that both corpora constitute promising material for further research on non-elite epistolary practices and the historical culture of writing.