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Hurryin’ Hoosiers and the American “Pattern”: Geographic Mobility in Indianapolis and Urban North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Robert G. Barrows
Robert G. Barrows*
Affiliation:
Indiana Historical Bureau
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Extract

In The Other Bostonians, Stephan Thernstrom argues that there has been “a fairly constant migration factor operating throughout American society since the opening of the nineteenth century.” Patterns of geographic mobility, according to Thernstrom (1973: 228, 220), “were products of forces that operated in much the same way throughout American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Finding considerable mobility everywhere—both in his own examination of Boston and in studies of other communities—he stressed the similarities among urban areas and postulated an “American pattern.” But while the principal finding of his examination of geographic mobility— that there was a great deal of it—remains secure, work done in recent years has rendered less satisfactory the emphasis on inter-urban uniformity. Indianapolis, for example, constitutes a striking exception to Thernstrom’s postulations; and when considered in conjunction with the results of other recent studies of urban population movement, the findings for Indiana’s capital indicate a need to reevaluate the validity and utility of using the term “pattern” to describe geographic mobility in urban North America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Spring 1981 , pp. 197 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1981

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