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James N. Gregory, Leah Platt Boustan. Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 248–249, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.248
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Economists can do things that are beyond the reach of most historians. The tradeoff is that many historical economists pursue narrow questions or ahistorical formulations. This book shows what a sophisticated economic historian can accomplish and at the same time demonstrates the differences between the two disciplines. In Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, Leah Platt Boustan zeroes in on a set of issues about the Great Migration that historians of the subject have usually treated casually as we move quickly through narratives that have sweeping agendas. This book delivers no appreciable narrative. Each chapter is a taut investigation that defines a problem, evaluates existing arguments, details data and methods, and delivers carefully reasoned results. These investigations focus on three sets of issues: (1) migrant origins: who left the South, and what factors contributed to their decisions? (2) financial impacts: did migrants earn more by leaving, and were northern-born African Americans hurt by increased competition for jobs; (3) urban effects: did the mass migration spur white-flight suburbanization and financial difficulties for core cities?
