Psychologists tell us that everyone is a bit neurotic. Academics may be a bit more neurotic than most people. When our work is going well, we get suspicious or at the very least we get anxious, always looking for new heights to scale. Part of the recent intellectual turbulence in the field of social history and in my own field of labor history, I would argue, is self-induced. We did not have enough problems, stuffing the lives of thousands of discrete individuals into our codebooks, reading everything that has ever been written about the work habits of iron moulders, plotting on maps the locations of saloons and cafes in relation to immigrant workers’ homes and then trying to make some sense out of all that. What we needed was a crisis. Like all good scholarly crises, what the crisis in social history is depends upon whom you ask, but if nothing else, the phenomenon gives us all just what we needed—something new to worry about.

John Bodnar’s Scholarship has touched—and even helped shape—current debates in several related historical sub-disciplines, including labor history, Afro-American history, and family history. He is, of course, also a leading public historian. During a period in the historians’ craft decried for its myopic compartmentalization and narrow specialization, the connectedness of Bodnar’s work to a range of social science concerns, themes, and issues makes it especially compelling for us. Yet Professor Bodnar has forged a record of research—praiseworthy for its quality no less than for its quantity—that clearly has impressed his colleagues, inspired new graduate students, and generally enlivened the field of immigration and ethnic history. It is on that central focus of his work that I wish to dwell here.

As any casual reader of John Bodnar’s major new synthesis, The Transplanted (1985), knows, the family is the central analytical concept in this work. Bodnar (1985: xvii) asks us to see immigrants’ adjustment to life in the United States in a new way—taking place at all “the points where immigrant families met the challenges of capitalism and modernity: the homeland, the neighborhood, the school, the workplace, the church, the family and the fraternal hall.” This represents a significant change—I would argue, an advance—over earlier studies which focused on the confrontation of ethnic groups with American society, on the interaction of modern and traditional cultures, or on the peculiarities of American class struggle (Handlin, 1951; Archdeacon, 1983; Cumbler, 1986).

By focusing on small family units and a large economic system, Bodnar is able to escape from the confines of the case history, which has dominated immigration history since the late 1960s. Furthermore, he is able to focus quite properly on the considerable fragmentation that characterized most immigrant communities in the United States. Because small groups of immigrants responded to capitalism, they inevitably made differing decisions, both socially and ideologically; they also supported leaders with fundamentally conflicting views of the best interests and futures for immigrant communities. Bodnar’s immigrants, in other words, are human beings who make history, although never under conditions which they themselves determined. Furthermore, they are not isolated economist decision makers.

John Bodnar’s Study—which I consider “the standard survey on the history of migration to the United States, which for many years will remain unsurpassed” (Hoerder, 1987)—also merits a controversial and lively discussion. A synthesis of the immigrant experience has long been called for. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudolph J. Vecoli’s penetrating critique (1964) and Victor Greene’s detailed study of east European miners (1968) dismantled Oscar Handlin’s paradigm (1951). The two decades since the end of the old paradigm witnessed the introduction of new methods, new approaches, and a new sensitivity to the roots of the migrants in their old cultures. I will first place Bodnar’s study in the context of two other recent syntheses and then raise some conceptual questions; in a third section I will take up issues related to the culture of origin and to the role of female migrants in community formation.

Picture, if you will, a little Methodist church in a rural setting. The year is 1890. It is the first day in January. Saturday afternoon. The church bell peals a welcome to family and friends celebrating the marriage of John Albert Salsbury and Alberta Effa Edgar. Some arrive on foot and others in horse-drawn vehicles. The horses are tied to the hitching-post and left to munch oats from their feed bags.

The people enter the church, and the minister greets each by name. A good turnout. Camden East is a close-knit community, and yet the preacher notes sadly that the congregation is getting smaller every year. Soft organ music plays as the people take their places. Then all becomes quiet: a short lull before the Wedding March begins. Everyone turns around to look at the smiling bride being led down the aisle by her proud father.

There are considerable differences regarding the estimates of pre-Columbian population in America, but everybody agrees that a dramatic reduction occurred after the discovery of the New World. Smallpox has usually been blamed for much of this reduction. Yet historians agree that this disease was not introduced into the Isle of Santo Domingo until 1518. By then, the Indians of the Antilles had practically disappeared and the importation of an African labor force was underway to replace them.

No documented explanation has been offered for the causes of this earliest demographic disaster. The basic clinical signs, however, of the first American epidemic in contemporary descriptions, along with the concordance of the accounts, strongly suggest one conclusion. The epidemic that broke out in 1493 at the Isle of Santo Domingo and was responsible for the disappearance of the American Indians in the Antilles during the first quarter of a century after the discovery was swine influenza.