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Writing African American Migrations1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2011
Abstract
Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson's A Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser's Sea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.
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- 2010 SHGAPE Presidential Address
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2011
References
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59 For examples, see Blocker, Jack S. Jr., “Wages of Migration: Jobs and Homeownership among Black and White Workers in Muncie, Indiana, 1920” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, eds. Okpewho, Isidore, Davies, Carole Boyce, and Mazrui, Ali A. (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 115–38Google Scholar; Maloney, “African American Migration to the North” and “Migration and Economic Opportunity in the 1910s”; Tolnay, Stewart E., “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces 75 (Dec. 1998): 487–514Google Scholar; Tolnay, “The Great Migration Gets Underway”; Digman, “Which Way to the Promised Land?”
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