Dirk Hoerder

Donna R. Gabaccia

Christiane Harzig

The study of migration is and always has been an interdisciplinary field of study, vast and vibrant in nature. This short introduction to the field, written by leading historians of migration for student readers, offers an acute analysis of key issues across several disciplines. It takes in its scope an overview of migrations through history, how classic theories have interpreted such movements, and contemporary topics and debates including transnational and transcultural lives, access to citizenship, and migrant entrepreneurship. Historical perspectives reveal how the scholarly field emerged and developed over time and across cultures and how historians of migration have recently begun to re-write the story of human life on earth. Throughout, the authors suggest how the movements of millions of mobile men and women persistently challenge changing scholarly paradigms for understanding their lives. Key concepts and theories, such as systems, networks, and gender, are explained and historicized to produce a complex picture of the interaction of migrants, scholars, and disciplinary cultures in a globalized world.

What is Migration History

Nora Faires

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns. They describe the ways that people have fashioned cross-border lives, as well as the effects of shifting labor markets in facilitating or hindering cross-border movement, the place of formal and informal politics in migration processes and migrants’ lives, and the creation and transformation of borderlands economies, societies, and cultures. This collection offers rich new perspectives on migration in North America and on the broader study of migration history. Contributors Jaime R. Aguila Rodolfo Casillas-R. Nora Faires Maria Cristina Garcia Delia Gonzáles de Reufels Brian Gratton Susan E. Gray James N. Gregory John Mason Hart Dirk Hoerder Dan Killoren Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu Catherine O’Donnell Kerry Preibisch Lara Putnam Bruno Ramirez Angelika Sauer Melanie Shell-Weiss Yukari Takai Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America

What is Migration History?

Donna R. Gabaccía

With a series of rich case studies focused on mobile laborers, this book demonstrates how the regional migrations of the early modern era came to be connected, contributing to the creation of an increasingly integrated nineteenth-century world.

Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s

Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims

To Know Our Many Selves profiles the history of Canadian studies, which began as early as the 1840s with the Study of Canada. In discussing this comprehensive examination of culture, Hoerder highlights its unique interdisciplinary approach, which included both sociological and political angles. Years later, as the study of other ethnicities was added to the cultural story of Canada, a solid foundaton was formed for the nation's master narrative. Against this background, To Know Our Many Selves focuses on why Canadian studies may be used as a sound model for the study of otehr societies in a framework of transcultural societal studies.

From the Study of Canada to Canadian Studies

To Know Our Many Selves

Distinguished Visiting Professor Dirk Hoerder

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis. Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.

Dirk Hoerder

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