Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T10:43:23.116Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective

Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

J. Trent Alexander
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Sociologists, demographers, and historians of the last few decades have pieced together a dramatically new understanding of the meaning of past migrations. The old story held that industry pulled recently dispossessed rural people to the city, where—along with deskilled artisans—they became part of a growing urban industrial proletariat. For migrants from rural areas, the process was thought to be catastrophic, requiring a total and often impossible adjustment to an urban world that was different in just about every imaginable way. Recent scholars have distanced themselves from this framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 3: Migration and Labor Markets , Fall 1998 , pp. 349 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Michael (1971) “Urban migration in nineteenth century Lancashire: Some insights into two competing hypotheses.” Annales de Demographie Historique 2: 13–26.Google Scholar
Bodnar, John, Simon, Roger, and Weber, Michael P. (1982) Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen (1989) “Black women and paid labor in the home: Industrial homework in Chicago in the 1920s,” in Boris, Eileen (ed.) Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor in the Home. Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 33–53.Google Scholar
Broussard, Albert S. (1993) Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Christaller, Walter (1966 [1933]) Central Places in Southern Germany. Translated by Baskin, Carlisle W. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Conway, Dennis (1980) “Step-wise migration: Toward a clarification of the mechanism.” International Migration Review 14: 3–14.Google Scholar
Crew, Spencer (1987) Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration, 1915-1940. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.Google Scholar
Cromartie, John, and Stack, Carol (1989) “Reinterpretation of black return and nonreturn migration to the South, 1975-80.” Geographical Review 79: 297–310.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Peter (1987) Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Grossman, James (1989) Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hanagan, Michael (1989) “Nascent proletarians: Migration patterns and class formation in the Stéphanois region, 1840-1880,” in Ogden, Philip E. and White, Paul E. (eds.) Migrants in Modern France. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman: 73–96.Google Scholar
Hochstadt, Steve (1981) “Migration and industrialization in Germany.” Social Science History 5: 445–68.Google Scholar
Hoerder, Dirk, ed. (1985) Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Hoerder, Dirk, and Moch, Leslie Page, eds. (1996) European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press.Google Scholar
Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lees, Lynn Hollen (1985) The Making of Modern Europe: 1000-1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hosmer, D. W., and Lemeshow, S. (1989) Applied Logistic Regression. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Jackson, James H. (1982) “Migration in Duisburg, 1867-1890: Occupational and familial contexts.” Journal of Urban History 8: 235–70.Google Scholar
Jackson, James H., and Moch, Leslie Page (1989) “Migration and the social history of modern Europe.” Historical Methods 22: 27–36.Google Scholar
Johnson, James H. (1990) “Recent African American migration trends in the United States.” Urban League Review 14: 39–55.Google Scholar
Jones, Jacqueline (1985) Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Jones, Jacqueline (1992) The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kiser, Clyde Vernon (1969 [1932]) Sea Island to City: A Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers. New York: Athenaeum.Google Scholar
Langewische, Dieter, and Lenger, Friedrich (1987) “Internal migration: Persistence and mobility,” in Bade, Klaus (ed.) Population, Labour, and Migration in 19th and 20th Century Germany. New York: Berg Publishers: 87–101.Google Scholar
Lemann, Nicholas (1991) The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Lewis, Earl (1991) In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lockridge, Kenneth (1974) Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Marks, Carole (1989) Farewell—We're Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
McHugh, Kevin E. (1987) “The black migration reversal in the United States.” Geographical Review 79:171–82.Google Scholar
Menard, Scott (1995) Applied Logistic Regression Analysis. Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, 07-106. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Moch, Leslie Page (1983) Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth Century France. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Moch, Leslie Page (1989) “The importance of mundane movements: Small towns, nearby places, and individual itineraries in the history of migration,” in Ogden, Philip E. and White, Paul E. (eds.) Migrants in Modern France. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman: 97–117.Google Scholar
Moch, Leslie Page (1992) Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Shirley Ann (1991) “Getting there, being there: African American migration to Richmond, California, 1910-45,” in Trotter, Joe William Jr. (ed.) The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 106–26.Google Scholar
Pleck, Elizabeth Hafkin (1979) Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865-1900. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
R. L. Polk and Co. (1934) Polk's Pittsburgh (Allegheny County, PA) City Directory. Pittsburgh: R. L. Polk and Co.Google Scholar
R. L. Polk and Co. (1935) Polk's Pittsburgh (Allegheny County, PA) City Directory. Pittsburgh: R. L. Polk and Co.Google Scholar
R. L. Polk and Co. (1936) Polk's Pittsburgh (Allegheny County, PA) City Directory. Pittsburgh: R. L. Polk and Co.Google Scholar
Ravenstein, E. G. (1885) “The laws of migration.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48:167–235.Google Scholar
Ravenstein, E. G. (1889) “The laws of migration, second paper.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52: 241–301.Google Scholar
Stack, Carol (1996) Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Sudman, Seymour (1976) Applied Sampling. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Quintard (1994) The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District, from 1890 through the Civil Rights Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Trotter, Joe William Jr. (1985) Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Urban Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Trotter, Joe William Jr. (1990) Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1912) Thirteenth Census of the United States: Abstract of the Census. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1933a) Fifteenth Census of the United States: Population. Vol. 4, Occupations by States. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1933b) Fifteenth Census of the United States: Population. Vol. 2, General Report, Statistics by Subject. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1935) Negroes in the United States: 1920-32. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1943a) Sixteenth Census of the United States: Population, Internal Migration, 1935 to 1940, Color and Sex and Migrants. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1943b) Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Characteristics of the Nonwhite Population by Race. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1943c) Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Unincorporated Communities, United States by State. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1975) Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 2. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1981a) Current Population Reports, series P-20, no. 363. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1981b) Current Population Reports, series P-25, no. 460. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1982) Current Population Reports, series P-20, no. 377. Washington: GPO.Google Scholar
Wiese, Andrew (1993) “Places of our own: Suburban black towns before 1960.” Journal of Urban History 19: 30–54.Google Scholar
Withers, Charles W. J., and Watson, Alexandra J. (1991) “Step-wise migration and Highland migration to Glasgow, 1852-98.” Journal of Historical Geography 17: 35–55.Google Scholar