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Keely Stauter-Halsted, Tara Zahra. The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1565–1568, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1565
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Migration history is a comparatively young field of study. Born out of sociological research at the dawn of the twentieth century, when great waves of immigrants crowded the shores of North America, historical scholarship on human movement has tended to emphasize the trauma of relocation and the struggle of integrating into a new land. Beginning with Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas’s foundational work on East European migrants, the five-volume The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), early studies addressed family, community, and social disruption among new migrants, but paid little heed to the role of the state in guiding or manipulating the flow of humans. Instead, migration specialists have told a tale of transitions from poverty to prosperity and from oppression to opportunity. Analysts of today’s refugees and forced migrants often echo this sentiment, equating mobility with freedom and relocation with escape from oppression. Despite the hardships they face along the way, migrants are assumed to benefit from the risks of the transatlantic journey and from the challenges of resettlement. During the great nineteenth-century migrations, Europeans fled the Irish Potato Famine, political oppression, pogroms, and institutional discrimination; in the aftermath of World War II, they turned their backs on genocide, tyranny, and totalitarian rule. For a century and a half, the people of Eastern Europe uprooted themselves and headed to the United States and Western Europe for safe haven. For too long, however, the community of origin has been all but neglected among migration scholars, and the role of state governments in guiding movement out of Eastern Europe has received scant attention.
