Defining the "Trans-Atlantic" Perspective on Immigration to the Americas

Abstract

The mainstay of historical scholarship on immigration to the United States is the case study. Despite the numerous articles and books inspired by the social history that is no longer new, few syntheses have systematically brought together diffuse microlevel findings on common aspects of the migration experience. The exceptional overviews include Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life by Roger Daniels (1990) and The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America by John Bodnar (1985). Still another overview is Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and North American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization, edited by Dirk Hoerder (1985), with articles analyzing the impact of the international economy on migration in Europe and America. Similarly, editors Ida Altman and James Horn, in the volume To Make America, and Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, in A Century of European Migrations, present articles by contributors who highlight overarching themes. The editors of both volumes emphasize the need to view the process of migration in a transnational rather than a national context. Altman and Horn call for the abandonment of traditional national perspectives that have artificially set Europe apart from America and the experiences of one colonizing nation from those of others (p. 22). Likewise this call for a trans-Atlantic perspective serves as the motif for Vecoli and Sinke who selected for their volume papers presented at a symposium held by the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota in 1986. There Frank Thistlethwaite reaffirmed that motif, which he had presented at an earlier conference in 1960. Vecoli regards him as a catalyst for subsequent explora-