AP® World History

World History

Migration

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Special Focus

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iii

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Kathy Callahan

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP

World History Course:

The Case of Early Modern Migration

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Tim Keirn

A Scottish Caribbean Case Study

....................................17

Alan Karras

South America: Land of Immigrants—and Emigrants:

Italian and Japanese Migration to Argentina and Brazil—and Back

. . .25

Peter Winn

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina and Brazil: Bringing

Immigration Scholarship into the Classroom

.........................41

Rick Warner

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Adam McKeown

American Immigration in a Transnational Perspective

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63

Robert Zeidel

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam—Involuntary Relocation of

Native Americans: A Lesson on Forced Migration

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71

Valerie Cox

10.

British Convict Forced Migration to Australia:

Causes and Consequences .........................................

101

Kathy Callahan

11. About the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

12. About the Authors .................................................119

Introduction

Kathy Callahan

University of Wisconsin–Stout

Menomonie, Wisconsin

One of my favorite family stories involves my great-great-grandfather, Cornelius

Callahan. Legend has is that he, during the Irish Potato Famine, sought escape from

starvation and deprivation on a ship bound for the United States. Upon arrival, his

ship was turned away; he and his fellow refugees were forced to return to Ireland.

Cornelius deﬁed the odds, surviving both the voyage home and the rest of the famine.

He married, had several children, and those children, duplicating the journey of their

father, immigrated to the United States; they, however, stayed. My great-grandfather

was one of those children. Without doubt, many of us have migration stories in our

family history, some with happy endings and others that do not convey happiness at

all, often because of such things as slavery or war. While this Special Focus on World

History explores the phenomenon of global migration and encourages teachers and

students to think about migration from a personal standpoint, the collection of articles

and lesson plans also importantly provides opportunities for teachers to be creative

in their classrooms when educating students about the subject of migration and the

challenges experienced by immigrants (and emigrants).

Teaching students about migration is an important aspect of world history

courses. It impacts virtually every time period and involves people around the globe,

some moving relatively locally but others, at great risks to themselves and their

futures, traveling great distances often across large geographic barriers. Discussions

about migration generally include a mention of “push–pull” factors—reasons for

people to leave their place of origin and attractions that take them to their planned

destinations. This combination, however, is not always the case. Governments have

often forced their subjects and citizens to leave one place for another, and it can

be said that this involves only a “push” or, more appropriately, a “kick” or a “shove.”

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Included in this collection are plentiful examples of push–pull, as well as push,

migration.

When asked to participate in this project as editor, one of the ﬁrst things that

came to my mind was the recent AP

World History Course Audit in which I, and

most teachers, participated. The audit revealed that teachers needed ideas on how to

approach the inclusion of diverse historical interpretations in their AP World History

courses, particularly in terms of secondary sources (see Tim Keirn’s article, for more

on this). To that end, this Special Focus project is designed not only to address

migration but also to provide ideas on bringing valuable primary and secondary

sources into the classroom. A combination of scholarly articles and lesson plans

are included here. Teachers and students alike will learn about different migratory

patterns, forced migration, as well as reactions to migration that affected the people of

all inhabited continents.

In the opening article, Tim Keirn writes about the challenges related to the use

of secondary source material and then offers an informative historiographical essay

on early modern migration meant to suggest to teachers sources for both their own

research and for assignment in the classroom. Alan Karras’s contribution provides

readers with a case study of Scottish immigration to the Caribbean in the eighteenth

century. He examines the “push–pull” economic migration of a relatively well-

educated, professional class of men, a group Karras asserts is generally overlooked in

migration narratives. In “South America: Land of Immigrants—and Emigrants,” Peter

Winn explores the interesting situation of Japanese and Italian migrants to Brazil

and Argentina, respectively. Many of these migrants, or their descendents, returned

home following a period in their destination country, more often than not ﬁnding that

going home was (and is) not always easy. Following this article, Rick Warner presents

a lesson plan that requires the use of Winn’s article in the classroom. Warner gives

teachers a myriad of ideas on how to present it and assess student learning as well.

Adam McKeown’s piece, “Understanding Global Migration Through Charts”, is a

hybrid of sorts, incorporating elements of both an article and a lesson plan. His charts

give teachers yet another angle from which to explore the migration topic and another

method to encourage student learning. In “American Immigration in a Transnational

Perspective,” Robert Zeidel presents a timely lesson plan that encourages students to

examine how immigrants to the United States were received in the Gilded Age, while

at the same time he encourages exploration of the contemporary issue of migration

(as does Warner in his lesson plan). Finally, there are two lesson plans, penned by

Valerie Cox and me, which look at migration through another lens: the experiences

Introduction

of the forced migrant. Cox’s contribution examines government-forced migration of

Native Americans in the United States, while my lesson glimpses at the experiences

of British convict migrants sentenced to terms of imprisonment in Australia, what

those convicts found upon arrival, and the effect their arrival had on the Aborigines of

Australia.

As Peter Winn’s and Adam McKeown’s articles suggest, major migrations were

not limited to the United States. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

were periods of massive movements of peoples, some of which can be attributed

to changes in transportation, enabling persons suffering from economic or political

problems to move with greater ease. Below I posit three additional ideas for teachers

to expand on this lesson plan.

• UsingthedatainMcKeown’sarticle,havestudentsexplorenineteenth-and

twentieth-century migration and immigration (often listed in both ways

in the indices) in a variety of world history textbooks. Assign groups of

students to critique the presentation in each textbook based on what they

have learned after lessons on migration/immigration. What do students

think should be covered in textbooks? Are Western migrations given more

favor in textbooks? Should there be more or less information about certain

immigrations? Why? Teachers themselves might ﬁnd Patrick Manning’s

book, Migration in World History, helpful in preparing for the student

critiques.

• UsingZeidelandWinn’sarticles,havestudentsdevelopacompare/contrast

question on immigration using the United States and either Argentina or

Brazil as their comparative countries. Ask students then to write a detailed

response to the question.

• Intoday’sworld,migrationcontinuestobeareality.AsbothRickWarner

and Zeidel suggest, a conversation with students about migration today

may prove to be very interesting. In terms of moving beyond the United

States and its current views on immigration, teachers will also ﬁnd

important comparative material in other countries on every inhabited

continent. For example, France and Germany (as well as all countries in the

European Union) have had immigrants come into their countries, eliciting

criticism from citizens and long-time residents alike. Similar situations

exist in Japan, particularly with concern over Korean immigration, and in

South Africa, where there is concern over Zimbabwean immigration. A

wonderful Web site, www.world-newspapers.com, provides links to English

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

language newspapers around the world. Teachers might assign students a

country and then have them go to newspapers from that country to draw

conclusions about immigration and how it affects that country, its economy,

and society in general.

Using the AP World History Course Description as a guide, teachers should ﬁnd the

resources contained in this book to be helpful in a variety of ways. First, all of AP

World History’s ﬁve themes are touched upon in some way by the works contained

below. Second, in the category of Habits of Mind, each of the required areas is

addressed in at least one of the resources, usually in more than one. These resources

are particularly rich in the Habits of Mind categories of constructing and evaluating

arguments, assessing continuity and change over time and over different world

regions, and understanding diversity of interpretations. Further, a broad timeline is

examined, focusing on the early modern and modern periods (exploring aspects of

the AP World History Chronological Periods from 1450 forward). Finally, teachers will

ﬁnd that the lesson plans are full of ideas on assessment, including writing projects,

presentations, and assessments oriented to the AP World History Exam free-response

questions: change and continuity over time, compare and contrast, and document-

based questions. Two of the lesson plans do address migration in the United States.

Each represents important events in the United States, both of which had global

ramiﬁcations. While each lesson is legitimate world history in its own right, some

teachers may wish to further globalize the lessons by using suggested extensions

included with each piece.

Many of us likely cover Columbian-era migration and the resulting forced

migration of slaves reasonably thoroughly in our classes, but as the semester draws

to a close or the AP World History Exam looms on the horizon, later migrations are

often slighted as we try to teach about the second industrial revolution, the world

wars, decolonization, and the Cold War in the few days that remain for instruction.

Incorporation of ideas contained within these resources will assist all teachers of

world history in covering topics that are perhaps not being examined as thoroughly

as they could be, providing information on topics that are not as well known as the

earlier transatlantic migrations, and supplying more secondary and new primary

sources for use in our classrooms.

The Role of Historical Interpretation in

the AP

World History Course: The Case

of Early Modern Migration

Tim Keirn

California State University–Long Beach

Long Beach, California

The AP World History course admirably raises the visibility of historical skills and

habits of mind in terms of what students are expected to know and do. In this sense,

a focus on the skills of history relative to content also parallels new lines of scholarly

inquiry within the profession and discipline. Led by scholars such as Robert Bain,

Peter Lee, and Sam Wineburg, over the past decade a ﬁeld of scholarship has arisen

that concentrates on what it means to learn and understand history and to think

historically. Much of this work emanated from Britain and was tied to the cognitive

revolution that shifted the focus in learning theory from behavior to issues of meaning

and epistemology. Moreover, the development of the ﬁeld was also facilitated by

the “culture wars” and public debates over the National History Standards in the

early 1990s, which greatly inﬂuenced historians’ new interest in issues of historical

memory.

As a consequence of these developments there is a clear emphasis upon the

notion that history is a human “representation” of the past—what is represented

of the past is a consequence of choice, which in turn is informed by contemporary

political and cultural considerations. This recognition involves a shift from a focus

upon substantive history (the facts of history) to the procedural ideas of history

(historical perspective and skill). The convergence here is in the preoccupation with

what is remembered or learned as opposed to what is taught. Given the signiﬁcance

of schools in the construction of collective historical memory, it is not surprising that

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

virtually all of this new scholarship in history learning and cognition is addressed to

historical teaching and learning in the K–12 environment.

This body of scholarship has also identiﬁed and addressed the cognitive

dissonance that exists between student understandings and epistemologies of history

and those of the historian. There is ample evidence that high school history students

understand and deduce meaning from history in discrete, chronologically arranged

factual terms. The understanding of historical skill in this sense is to memorize and

posit facts within a chronological and teleological sequence of “truths.” Thus, when

presented with primary sources and accounts of the past, students’ default position

is to read them factually and chronologically as opposed to historically. Indeed, this

cognitive dissonance is explicit in the consistency of student struggles with point

of view on the document-based question of the AP World History Exam. Indeed, it is

also evident in student responses to the comparative question as well, where students

tend to signify comparison in the form of two juxtaposed factual narratives followed

by (at best) very general qualiﬁcations of similarities and differences.

This scholarship in history learning and cognition has also drawn attention

to students’ difﬁculties in detecting and evaluating agency in history. Put simply,

for many students the facts that predate a speciﬁed event or threshold become

“causes” and those thereafter “consequences.” For those students who do identify

agency beyond a factual basis, the tendency is to gravitate toward—and prioritize—

individual action. In this way, history is understood in explicitly personal and

individual means. Anyone who has read the “change over time” question at the

AP World History Reading has ample evidence of this type of student historical

“thinking,” where, for example, states and regions are rendered in highly personiﬁed

ways with distinctly individual human attributes (i.e., China “feared” nomads, or

“liked” silver).

This body of scholarship argues that these preinstructional student

epistemologies and understandings of history are constructed and informed by

a litany of inﬂuences. Wineburg (2001) has argued that a considerable amount of

student historical understanding is shaped by inﬂuences outside the classroom (e.g.,

television and media, family, and local community) that often confuse and intermingle

notions of heritage with history. Others have identiﬁed the importance of testing

and previous instruction in reinforcing student notions that history is all about facts.

Indeed, underresearched in this regard is the role of teacher training and education,

where preliminary evidence suggests that preservice teachers’ perceptions of history

are far closer to those of the K–12 student than those of the historian. However, with

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP World History Course

regard to the AP World History course, the most important inﬂuence upon student

understanding is the textbook. Richard Paxton (1991) and others have argued that

the textbook is the most important inﬂuence in constructing and reinforcing student

factoid narrative understandings of history. Textbooks present history factually and in

narrative form. There is no sense of historical inquiry or interpretation evident within

the text. Metadiscursive elements that might serve as implicit markers of inquiry or

interpretation (e.g., use of terms such as “perhaps” or “some historians argue”) are

routinely edited out of the texts. While there is much discussion about textbooks in

the AP World History community, almost all of it addresses substantive as opposed

to procedural aspects of history, focusing upon issues of the extent of global, regional,

and eurocentric coverage. Those textbooks that do include aspects of historical

interpretation do so as boxed “examples” delineated from the narrative, akin to the

historical rendering of women and indigenous peoples to the “margins” of the text.

Research shows that students do not read these boxes unless prompted, and indeed

that inﬂuence of the textbook upon the construction of factoid meaning is congruent

with the level of instructional reliance on the textbook.

This new scholarship has represented secondary teachers of history as “in

the breach” between student and disciplinary notions of thinking. The charge of

the teacher in this context is to shift student “habits of mind” to more authentic

understandings and practices grounded within the discipline of history. Informed

by the theories of the Soviet theorist Lev Vygotsky, much of this literature promotes

learning through social interaction and authentic disciplinary tasks—put simply,

by “doing” as opposed to “receiving” history. To shift student habits of mind and

facilitate authentic historical thinking and understanding, learning tools (e.g., graphic

organizers, essential questions, and prompts) and appropriate assessments have to

be generated that support inquiry-based instruction. The shaping of habits of mind

comes only with repeated practice and scaffolding, where the latter is adjusted until

the objective habits have been internalized.

Relative to U.S. and European history, these issues of cognitive dissonance and

the challenges of shifting student habits of mind are most problematic in the realm of

world history. The large temporal and spatial scales of world history amplify student

(and teacher) preinstructional anxieties about competence and means of factual

retention. The relative newness of world history as a subﬁeld ensures that there is no

easily recognized master narrative to memorize. Moreover, the role of the individual

agency in world history is less signiﬁcant in realms of history where the spatial

and temporal scales are narrower. Despite these challenges, the AP World History

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

course succeeds in many ways because it is in fact a product of not only scholarship

in world history but also this new research in history learning and cognition. The

aforementioned Robert Bain was on the initial Development Committee for AP World

History. That committee was chaired by Peter Stearns, who has been inﬂuential

nationally in attempts to bridge the gap between the work of historians and history

educators. Indeed, seven “Habits of Mind” are identiﬁed in the AP World History

Course Outline, all of which reﬂect both discipline- and inquiry-based approaches to

learning history and generating historical thinking. In AP World History, students are

asked to demonstrate competence in essential disciplinary skills such as evaluating

evidence, identifying agency in historical change and continuity, and interpreting

primary sources and accounts. The structure of the AP World History Exam demands

competence in historical skills and thinking. For example, the document-based

question, especially with its demand for point of view and additional documentation,

assesses the ﬁrst two Habits of Mind that are concerned with evaluating evidence

and interpreting primary documents. The “change over time” question demands

that students demonstrate understanding of historical agency and signiﬁcance (i.e.,

the third habit of mind). The comparative question asks that students demonstrate

analytical competence in generating meaningful historical comparisons. In line

with the conclusions of the scholarship of history learning and cognition, these AP

assessments shape (consciously or unconsciously) instruction. Teachers routinely

create learning tools and scaffolds (e.g., graphic organizers, document prompts

and assessments, historical problem-solving exercises, etc.) that work to facilitate

authentic historical skills and thinking to be demonstrated ultimately on the AP World

History Exam.

However, despite these notable achievements in promoting historical thinking,

I would argue that the most important identiﬁed Habit of Mind “addressed by any

rigorous history course” as stated in the AP World History Course Outline, reproduced

in the AP World History Course Description, is the fourth, which pertains to student

understanding of diverse historical interpretations. It is here that students must

come to grips with the core notions that history is a dynamic and interpretive

discipline, and a representation of the past based on conventions of critical

evaluation of evidence. It is this Habit of Mind that directly confronts preinstructional

epistemologies that perceive of history in strictly factual (and “truthful”) terms. For

students to demonstrate understanding and evaluation of historical interpretations

of the past, they must ﬁrst come to recognize that these representations are not

static and change over time. In this sense, they need a basic understanding of

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP World History Course

historiographic principles whereby historical “change” is a consequence of alterations

in the body and validity of evidence (and changing theories applied thereto). Moreover,

this also requires recognition of the means by which the present informs the past—

that is, what is “in” or “out” of history is informed by contemporary questions and

interests. To accomplish these tasks, students need to be introduced to the means by

which disciplinary knowledge is constructed and disseminated, and to understand

(critically) the conventions and limitations of the genres of historical literature (i.e.,

textbooks, and peer-reviewed monographs and articles).

Despite its signiﬁcance, the habit of historical interpretation is the one least

likely to be addressed by those teaching the AP World History course. Of those AP

World History syllabi that were not authorized after their ﬁrst submission in the AP

Course Audit, close to 75 percent were not authorized because they did not meet

the College Board requirement that students are taught to “analyze evidence and

interpretations presented in historical scholarship.” Why is this the case? Clearly, of

major signiﬁcance is the fact that this habit of mind is not explicitly tested on the AP

World History Exam. If assessment guides instruction, then it should not be surprising

that teachers are likely to dedicate instructional time to other activities. However,

anecdotal information from my experience in workshops and institutes indicates that

there is also some confusion about the term “historical interpretation” whereby it is

understood to mean the interpretation of primary documents as opposed to secondary

accounts of the past. From this perspective, “preparing for the DBQ” is the means for

shaping students’ understanding of historical interpretation. Consequently, students

are not engaged with scholarly and historiographic interpretation, which forms the

basis of this habit of mind. Of course, another obstacle to the shaping of this habit

of mind is the paucity of secondary materials available to AP World History teachers

that move beyond textbook and tertiary representations and address historiographic

and contemporary scholarly interpretations of the past. Given the focus of this volume

on migration, what follows is a discussion of some accessible scholarly materials that

relate to migration in the early modern period (1450–1750) of the AP World History

curriculum, and provide the opportunity for AP World History teachers and students

alike to engage with historical scholarship and interpretation in the spirit of the fourth

AP World History habit of mind and Course Audit requirement.

The historiographic development of “new” world historical approaches in the

1990s has emphasized the importance of cross-cultural interaction and encounters

in the process of creating an integrated and global world history. This global

approach forms the overarching conceptualization of the AP World History course.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Alongside the themes of trade and empire, migration is a key concept in representing

and accounting for cross-cultural interaction and encounters in the global past.

When examined on a world historical scale, the early modern period takes on new

signiﬁcance as the intensity of postclassical transregional interaction and integration

in Afro-Eurasia—and on a lesser scale in the Americas and Paciﬁc—became truly

global. Migration, particularly in maritime basins, played a critical role in this process,

and the scholarship addressing it is rich.

An excellent general starting point is Patrick Manning’s recent Migration in

World History (Manning 1990). This is an accessible work that synthesizes much

recent research in transregional migration and demonstrates its applicability to world

history. Informed by David Christian’s notions of “big history,” the temporal scale

here is large (starting with early hominid movements), and the amount of material

dedicated to early modern migration is relatively small. Yet what is extremely useful

is the author’s discussion of models of migration patterns, which scholars use to

provide coherence to our understanding of the origins and consequences of human

movement. Conceptualizations of push–pull and cross-community migration, and

the role of networks and colonization, are useful constructs for understanding early

modern migration. Another useful overview of current scholarship is the Cambridge

Survey of World Migration (1995), edited by Robin Cohen. While migration is

categorized here on a regional basis, each article provides an excellent synopsis of the

state of research by acknowledged scholars in each particular ﬁeld.

As Manning demonstrates, migration is not easily disentangled from other

identiﬁed themes of global interaction and integration such as trade, empire, and

colonization. Hence a number of other important and accessible scholarly works on

trade are useful in interpreting the role of migration in world history. For example,

Philip Curtin’s seminal Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Curtin 1984) provides

a very readable and scholarly account of the transregional signiﬁcance of trade with a

speciﬁc focus upon diasporic communities as instrumental in the formation of trading

networks and as mediators of cross-cultural encounters. The chapters dedicated

to the early modern period allow students to compare the role of Armenian, Bugis,

Chinese, and Portuguese migrants in establishing the diasporic communities and

trade networks in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In addition, Cohen’s Global

Diasporas (Cohen 1997) provides an important introduction to the concept of diaspora

and demonstrates how scholars have extended the concept from a focus upon

migrants involved in trade and colonization to labor diasporas, where the term is often

associated with collective trauma. This is most notable in the early modern period,

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP World History Course

where, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), scholars increasingly

conceptualize the African slave trade in diasporic terms.

The involuntary migration of the Atlantic slave trade is the only early modern

migration stated and identiﬁed within the AP World History Course Description. The

movement of Africans across the Atlantic far outnumbered European emigration

until the 1840s. Published in 1969, Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census

(Curtin 1969) spawned considerable historical scholarly debate about the quantity,

origins, and impact of Atlantic slavery. Curtin’s numbers have generally stood the

test of historical critique, and the debate is summarized in Herbert Klein’s useful

scholarly overview, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Klein 1999). Quantitative evidence

and interpretation is also prevalent in David Eltis’s The Rise of African Slavery in

the Americas (Eltis 1999), where the author argues that African agency was critical

in determining who entered the slave trade and how it was conducted. Indeed,

historians have recently paid far closer attention to African agency within the

Atlantic world—paralleling and contributing to the aforementioned representation

of an African diaspora. John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the

Atlantic World (Thornton 1998) was in the vanguard of this scholarly movement in

demonstrating the signiﬁcance of African culture in the colonial Americas, and in

emphasizing its often synchronous transformations with European and Amerindian

cultures. Similar trajectories are found in the scholarship of Colonial British

America—for example, in Philip Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the

Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country (Morgan 1998)—too often ignored

as a consequence of the binary (wrongly) established relationship between world and

U.S. history. Finally, recent work has come to challenge the focus upon Afro-European

syncretism in the Americas. For example, James Sweet’s Recreating Africa (Sweet

2006) shares Thornton and Morgan’s surfacing of African agency but argues that

the most pronounced syncretism to take place in early modern Brazil was between

different African cultures—”African” culture was a product of American experience

and a consequence of forced migration.

Scholars such as Pier Larson remind us that scholarly considerations of an

African diaspora are too focused upon the Atlantic even in the early modern period

(Larson 2007). The Transaharan and Indian Ocean African slave trades were still

considerable throughout the early modern period, and the movement of Atlantic

African slaves did not outnumber the Oriental trade until the seventeenth century.

Paul Lovejoy’s Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Lovejoy 2000)

provides an important scholarly interpretation of the impact of the latter trade both

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

within and without Africa in the early modern period. Manning’s Slavery and African

Life (Manning 1990) also addresses this issue and argues that Atlantic, African, and

Oriental movements of slaves were inseparable.

While not speciﬁcally identiﬁed for study in the AP World History Course

Description, European migration in the early modern period (never on the global

scale of the movement of Africans) played an implicit role in two important AP World

History topics—European colonization and the Columbian Exchange. With the growth

of Atlantic history as a distinct historical subﬁeld, there is a growing body of scholarly

literature that addresses the nature of European conquest and cultural encounter in

the early modern period. Two recent works stand out for students and instructors of

AP World History. Martin Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Restall

2004) is a very accessible historiographic debunking of common representations

of the Spanish conquest, and instead associates it with greater consideration for

Iberian and global contexts, and the nature of Spanish migration to the Americas.

J. H. Elliot’s Empires of the Atlantic World (Elliot 2007) also questions former

interpretations of European colonization and does so in a comparative examination

of Spanish and English colonial settlement in the Americas. A comparison of the

nature of migration and settlement is a critical component of his argument. With its

focus upon indigenous agency, the current scholarship on European–Amerindian

encounter parallels to some extent the historical literature of the African diaspora.

This current is especially strong among historians who study the South Atlantic. John

Kicza’s Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization,

(Kicza 2002) synthesizes much of this scholarship succinctly. Moreover, a number of

studies in Colonial American history concretely address world historical themes of

cross-cultural exchange and synthesis. Colin Calloway’s New Worlds for All (Calloway

1998) is a very readable account of the exchange, fusion, and transformation of cultural

practices between European migrants and Amerindians in early North America.

Alfred Crosby’s groundbreaking The Columbian Exchange (Crosby 1973)

examined the environmental consequences of European migration in the early

modern period. Recent scholarship has built upon his historiographic foundation

and established a growing literature in early modern environmental history. Much

of this body of scholarship has applicability in the AP World History classroom.

Elinor Melville’s A Plague of Sheep (Melville 1997) addresses the environmental

consequences of animal domestication in colonial Mexico. Virginia DeJohn

Anderson’s Creatures of Empire (Anderson 2005) argues for “animal agency” in

studying the impact of domesticated animals (and their often feral offspring) brought

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP World History Course

by English migrants to North America in understanding the mechanisms of colonial

expansion. Indeed, in John Richards’s The Unending Frontier (Richards 2003), internal

and external migration, and the corresponding expansion of settled agricultural

frontiers, were instrumental in global early modern environmental change.

In conclusion, it is impossible to do justice to the body of historical literature

and recent scholarship that addresses and represents migration in early modern

world history. Certainly, a number of important early modern migrations are not

identiﬁed—not even implicitly—in the AP World History Course Description. Such early

modern migrations would include Turkic migrations in Central and South Asia, internal

migration and frontier expansion in Russia and China, and the commonality of rural to

urban migration on a global scale. But what is hoped is that some of this scholarship

ﬁnds it way into the AP World History classroom in complete or excerpted form, and

in doing so students are distanced temporarily from the textbook, and engaged with

historical scholarship in the pursuit of the interpretive historical habit of mind.

Bibliography

Anderson, V. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early

America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bain, R. B. “Into the Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction.” In

Knowledge, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International

Perspectives, edited by P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, and S. Wineburg, 331-52. New

York: New York University Press, 2000.

Calloway, C. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early

America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Cohen, R. Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995.

Cohen, R. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press,

19 97.

Crosby, A. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.

New York: Praeger Press, 1973.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Curtin, P. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1969.

Curtin, P. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1984.

Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Atlantic World,

1492–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Eltis, D. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999.

Gilroy, P. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993.

Kicza, J. Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization.

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Klein, H. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Larson, P. “African Diasporas and the Atlantic.” In The Atlantic in Global History,

1500–2000, edited by J. Canizares-Esguerra and E. Seeman, 29–48. Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.

Lee, P. J. “Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History.” In How Students

Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom, edited by M. S.

Donovan and J. D. Bransford, 31–87. Washington, DC: National Academies

Press, 2005.

Lovejoy, P. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Manning, P. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Manning, P. Migration in World History. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.

Melville, E. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of

Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

The Role of Historical Interpretation in the AP World History Course

Morgan, P. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake

and Low Country. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Paxton, R. “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read

Them.” Review of Educational Research 69:3 (1999): 315-39.

Restall, M. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2004.

Richards, J. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern

World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Sweet, J. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese

World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Thornton, J. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Wineburg, S. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of

Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

A Scottish Caribbean Case Study

Alan Karras

University of California–Berkeley

Berkeley, California

One of the most important problems to face instructors of AP World History is how

to integrate speciﬁc case studies into a course that is truly global in focus. We all

have our preferred stories and illustrations; if only we could ﬁnd a way to use all of

them in every class, we reason, we’d be serving our students’ interests and making

sure that, at least, students would have good examples upon which to draw for their

assessments. And we’d get to discuss material about which we really care.

But AP World History is, of course, not about including everything. Nor, for

that matter, is it either essential or practical to include every piece of important

content in our college-level world history courses. We simply cannot teach about

every expansionist society that ever existed on earth, every environmental change

that affected human settlements, or every war that resulted in geopolitical changes.

Rather, we must all ﬁnd ways to teach our global, or macro, world historical processes

with speciﬁc micro, or local, examples. Indeed, the best world history courses, AP or

college, focus on process and draw illustrative examples from a myriad of possibilities.

Because teachers should have choice in which examples they use, even though there

is little choice in the processes that must be covered, it is essential to have a strategy

for ﬁguring out how to cover the macroissues of the course while integrating the cool

microstudies that made most of us want to study history in the ﬁrst place.

This essay, then, attempts to provide a useful way to begin to think about

the process of human migrations on a global scale while providing those essential

concrete examples and case studies that we all love. It is not meant to be exhaustive,

by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it is meant to provoke thought, inspire

changes to the actual teaching of the course, and ﬁnd ways to get students to become

active participants in their own educations. I will admit that it is somewhat selﬁsh,

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

in that the microstudy on which I will be focusing comes from research that I carried

out 20 years ago, long before I had anything to do with the AP Program. That research

was organized and published in my book, Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migrants in

Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1820 (Karras 1992). As the years progressed, and

I became active in teaching world history, and then participating in the AP World

History Development Committee, it became clear to me that this research could be

used to illustrate how microstudies can be used to inform macronarratives.

The research that I did examined the personal histories of a group of several

hundred Scottish migrants. They exhibited the typical eighteenth-century migrant

pattern in some ways (most of them were young single men), but differed from it

in other ways (most of them were highly educated and came from families that

were anything but destitute). They went to areas where there was new economic

opportunity available to them—places like Jamaica and, after 1763, the ceded

Caribbean islands. They went, as well, to places where innovations to commercial

patterns allowed greater opportunity for advancement, such as the tobacco colonies in

Virginia and Maryland.

The research that I did was fun but time-consuming. I looked at letters, account

books, newspaper articles, commercial records, and advertisements. What I observed

through collecting this data was something that many historians of the period

overlooked. These young men migrated with the express intention of returning home

after a certain period of time. That intention, of course, shaped their behavior while

in the colonies, just as it shaped their interactions with people back in Britain. If one

were to judge them just based on the content of their letters, they were angry people

who more or less loathed the place to which they traveled and many of the people

whom they found already living there. In other words, they never intended to be

permanent settlers in the Americas. From the perspective of American history, this

certainly ran against the traditional narratives. From the perspective of Scottish, or

even British, history, these people had left—so had their stories excluded from the

national narrative.

1. At this point, it might be useful to comment brieﬂy upon the reason for studying Scottish migration in the eighteenth

century. In the ﬁrst place, many American historians until that time had considered all British migrants to the Americas to

have been indistinguishable from one another. Looking at those of Scottish (or indeed Irish or Scots-Irish) ancestry showed

a much clearer separation of the various migrant groups in terms of their geographic origins, occupational diversity, as

well as in the destinations to which they migrated. It also provided a strong counterargument to the assimilationist myth

of American history more generally. In the second place, from a world historical perspective, the Scottish migration of

the eighteenth century proved to be a mechanism to understand the way in which the British empire of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries was administered. The same Scottish families that had sent migrants to the Americas in the

eighteenth century were also providing their sons to be the administrators for the East India Company’s colonies and, later,

the British government’s ofﬁcers in colonial territories. As a result, exploring the early Scots migration allows us to make

meaningful comparisons to understand the ways in which British colonies were administered during the height of empire.

A Scottish Caribbean Case Study

In short, I was looking at a signiﬁcant group of people—relatively small in

number by total population—that played a key role in the development and economic

life of the British imperial economy in the eighteenth century. But they had been

excluded, even if out of ignorance, from the national narratives of either their sending

or receiving societies. As a result, I struggled to explain them in some convincing

way, or make them signiﬁcant outside of the important economic roles that they

played. But then I discovered Paul Siu’s The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social

Isolation (Siu 1987) and the concept of the sojourner. Siu, a sociologist, examined

a different group of migrants in a different time and place, and identiﬁed several

important characteristics that to one degree or another applied to my eighteenth-

century cohort. Finally, I thought, I could make a global connection and say something

signiﬁcant. Using that most basic of the world history skills, comparison, I was able

to analyze my research in the context of someone else’s, and move toward saying

something useful about a relatively unknown group of people.

Those who study migrations generally think of it as a one-directional movement

that needed to be explained by two different, but related, sets of factors. Sojourners,

some (but not all) of whom actually traveled backward and forward across the

Atlantic, actually behaved a certain way because of their ideas about themselves,

their neighbors, and their timetables. This challenged the idea of a one-directional

movement, or process. And it makes for a very good teachable moment. Not everyone

who migrates intends to do so for the duration of his or her life. Since many of our

students, or their parents, migrated from somewhere else—city, state, country—it is

easy to engage them in such a conversation, and to teach them the historical method

required to construct a personal or familial narrative of migration. This narrative can

then, of course, be aggregated into a class narrative, which can then be compared to

other narratives and analyzed appropriately.

In order to explain migrations, many historians rely upon what they refer to as

“push” factors and “pull” factors. We can look at any human migration, whether from

one grade to the next or one continent to another, and compare them by looking at

these factors. I will deal with each of them in turn. First, we should consider the

“push” factors. By this, I generally mean those circumstances that drove individuals to

migrate. For many of them, something in their native society failed them and caused

them to leave. Was it, perhaps, a family disagreement that resulted in irreconcilable

differences? Or was it a shortage of land for all of the members of the family to raise

their own families? In some cases, a generally poor economy could not provide

adequate opportunities for upward mobility for enough people. In other societies, it

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

might be a fear of political persecution for one’s beliefs or activities. Thinking about, or

typologizing, such factors for any one group of migrants can be a very useful activity

for understanding migrations more generally.

The same is also true for the “pull” factors. Behind these is a desire to explain

why a certain group of people travels to one place, and not another. It is easy to

discern greater economic opportunity in one part of the world than another, at least

at the same moment in time. There might be other factors as well. For example, the

presence of friends and countrymen already there could provide an existing social

network that facilitates integration, if not assimilation. Some migrants might be drawn

to places where they can speak freely on subjects that might have been restricted at

home. Or they might just prefer the climate to that in their native society. Identifying

and exploring all of these factors can help students explain a particular population

movement and relate seemingly diverse population movements to each other.

In the case of the Scottish sojourners, the “push” factors were fairly clear. Most

of them were, simply, overeducated. The Scottish economy could simply not support

the numbers of doctors, attorneys, and merchants that its educational system put

out. Migration to other places in Britain (after 1707, of course) and then to British

colonies provided some relief. For others, there was some political pressure as well,

after the Jacobite uprising in 1745. What better way to demonstrate loyalty to the

national government than by going to work for it? Many Scot migrants in this period

went to the Americas in the service of government. That they also did so in the

nineteenth century, after the loss of North America and the declining proﬁtability

of the Caribbean colonies, allows us to contemplate both changes and continuities

over time. What was common to these people was the idea that it was not necessary

to leave permanently, since there was nothing wrong with Scotland, other than

insufﬁcient resources to generate economic growth and support its population.

Once wealth had been achieved, the logic went, return would be easy—and upward

mobility achieved.

What drew the Scots to Jamaica (as well as other colonies to which they

migrated), and not, say, Barbados was also fairly clear. Jamaica had a lot of land; it

was growing as a society. It was not, as Barbados was in the eighteenth century, all

cultivated. Much larger, with a large frontier, the colony proved an attractive place

to engage in wealth cultivation. More land under cultivation meant more slaves and

therefore the need for more managers, doctors, and merchants to actually run the

place. Of course, the largest and wealthiest landowners had already returned to

Europe, so they were hiring others to serve as surrogates for them. This allowed well-

A Scottish Caribbean Case Study

educated people to remain well-educated people and actually gave them opportunities

to themselves advance. When Britain gained new colonies after 1763, as it turned

out, there were new waves of Scots going across the Atlantic to manage them. Of

course, the presence of Scots already there made it easier to establish communities.

The Scots were often criticized for being “clannish.” What this meant, however, was

simply that they cultivated business opportunities with each other, sponsored new

migrants, and lived in the same neighborhoods. These patterns should be familiar

to everyone who has looked at any migrant community in contemporary America.

The Scots did not exhibit clannish behavior; rather, they behaved as many groups of

migrants did—and still do.

I’ve already alluded to the fact that migrants frequently get omitted from the

national histories of the places from which they come AND the national histories to

which they travel. It is easy as well to look at the current debate in many countries,

like the United States, or Belgium, or South Africa, and to see the ways in which

migrants are restricted and conﬁned, as if wealth creation will expire if enough

migrants are allowed in. In some places, national language restrictions are put in

place in order to hasten the process of assimilation. Studying such debates and

policies over time and space will lead to analysis of changes and continuities.

All of this, however, still does not allow us to see migrants as they see (or saw)

themselves. We ought to know if they consider themselves sojourners, for example,

or if they see themselves as political refugees or economic migrants. Moreover, we

should at least be interested in how they see the intersection of their lives with

the global historical process of nationalism and identity formation. It might be that

historians, like much of the rest of society, assume that it is only possible to associate

with one “national” identity. But that may not be right.

In the case of the eighteenth-century Scots, who never saw themselves as

Jamaican or Virginian, there ought to be some inquiry. While most of them saw

themselves as wholly Scottish, a few others referred to themselves as “North British.”

This label clearly connected them to the British state, as opposed to the Scottish

nation, and represented a choice. Why that choice would have been made warrants

further study; sufﬁce it to say here that those who used this term more often than not

were seeking something—money, a job, or perhaps a payment for remaining loyal to

the British crown during the American War for Independence (1776–1783) from the

British government.

Still, others saw the Scots negatively—they were perceived to be a group

with certain characteristics, so they must, in fact, have been a group with certain

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

characteristics. Because they were so educated and held certain occupations, another

sociological theory, that of middlemen minorities,

entered into play here. When things

went wrong, as they did in many places, but especially in the Chesapeake, the Scots

became scapegoats and had their property conﬁscated; many ﬂed. It took them years

to recover, and it was only the opening of new territories that made some of the

recovery possible.

What I have attempted to do at this point is explore the ways in which looking

at a particular group of migrants in a single place or time period can lead to some

important ways of understanding world history and, just as importantly, teaching that

history to increasingly diverse groups of students. The goal in all of this, of course,

is to begin with something known—the size of a movement of people, or their jobs,

or the places to which they went—and to work outward from there. To begin with a

historical process like migration, and then to look at a speciﬁc case in some detail, it

becomes possible to use the AP course’s historical thinking skills (e.g., comparison,

analysis) to create a working hypothesis on the global scale. I’ve used the Scots as an

entrée into the subject, in order to demonstrate what such work might look like.

There is still more work that can be done to expand student content knowledge

while also modeling the historical thinking skills. Those of us who work with a

process-centered approach to world history might be inclined to look for other groups

that had the same demographic characteristics and achieved either similar or

different results. Two groups of migrants come to mind here: Jews and Armenians.

Both think of themselves as being in diaspora. How is this different from sojourners,

we might ask—and we’d be off and running. Both groups are generally seen to be

highly educated, both have been scapegoated when times got tough, and both

created networks of ethnically and religiously similar people around them. They

generally went to different places than the eighteenth-century Scots (though there

were plenty of Jews in Jamaica), but how else were they different? Considering this

question allows students to hone basic skills that are essential to AP World History

courses.

We could also contemplate different groups—impoverished Mexican labor

migrants to the United States, Indian tech workers to Silicon Valley, or Persians

ﬂeeing the Iranian Revolution in 1979—all as a way to get students to understand

the processes of migration. The questions remain the same, but the results of the

2. Middlemen minorities are people who are ethnically distinct from the rest of society and who occupy middling-level

occupational categories. Korean grocers now hold such positions. The sociological theory behind this suggests that this

kind of person often becomes a scapegoat.

A Scottish Caribbean Case Study

inquiries could be vastly different. The results in some ways matter much less than

the process of dissecting and reconstructing the process itself.

When I teach world history, admittedly at a place that is very different from the

environments with which most readers of this piece will be familiar, I always give a

lecture on the big processes of each period. The spread of industrialization, or the rise

of nationalism, are good examples of these kinds of topics. But migration does not

characterize a single period—it characterizes EVERY period. As a result, it is included

in every period of the course that I teach, just as it is included in every period of AP

World History (even if we don’t call it migration). Just as I can talk about sojourners,

I can also talk about bonded labor (which includes slaves) in most periods. Just as I

can describe economic migrants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I

can also describe them in virtually every period throughout the course. The content

is important, but more important are the historical thinking skills that studying

migration can teach us.

As teachers, it is important that our students learn how to think, how to

draw conclusions about speciﬁc facts and speciﬁc time periods, and then how to

relate those conclusions to other times and places. To cover migration in AP World

History, then, teachers can choose one or two groups of migrants during the course

and dissect the population movements while analyzing goals and outcomes of the

migrants. Going through that process, especially if they are able to relate their own

personal or family stories to it, will cause them to master many of the thinking skills

that are so critical to success not just on the AP World History Exam, not just in my

college classroom but also as citizens of an irreversibly, dare I say globally, connected

world.

South America: Land of Immigrants

and Emigrants — Italian and

Japanese Migration to Argentina

and Brazil — and Back

Peter Winn

Tufts University

Medford, Massachusetts

The history of major Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil in

recent centuries, demonstrates that they were nations shaped—and reshaped—by

immigration. At the height of mass transatlantic European immigration during the

last decades of the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century,

between 5 and 7 million Europeans immigrated to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The intensity of this transoceanic immigration was often as great, or greater than,

the contemporary mass immigration to the United States. As a percentage of its

population, during the late nineteenth century Argentina received twice as many

immigrants as the United States. Less well known still is another major transoceanic

labor migration to South America: the migration of Japanese contract laborers to Brazil

during the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century.

Some of the transoceanic immigrants to South America were voluntary migrants,

even when they came as contract labor. This was the case of the Italian immigrants

to Argentina—now probably that country’s largest ethnic group—and also of the

Japanese immigrants to Brazil. (These Japanese migrants compose the origin of

what is today the largest overseas population of Japanese descent outside the Paciﬁc

islands.) What makes these migration ﬂows particularly interesting to teachers and

students of world history is that a century later this migration ﬂow reversed, sending

the grandchildren of those Italian and Japanese immigrants back to an Italy or

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Japan that they had never known. Still others were involuntary migrants, as was the

case with the African slaves whose descendants now compose a majority of Brazil’s

population of 180 million—justifying its claim to be the second-largest “African

nation” after Nigeria.

Transoceanic migration, voluntary or involuntary, should be a central theme of

world history, one to which students, whose families likely have migration stories

in their past, can relate. It lends itself to an analysis that blends microhistories with

macrohistories, incorporating the individual memoir or community chronicle, and to

telling stories that students can share. Shifting migration patterns are a reﬂection

of changing relationships between national economies around the world during

successive processes of industrialization and globalization, and thus windows to

larger historical processes.

The histories of voluntary Italian migration to and from Argentina and voluntary

Japanese migration to and from Brazil offer illuminating examples of these shifting

relationships and historical processes, and also engaging stories of cultural conﬂicts

and adaptations.

I. Italian Immigration/Emigration to and from Argentina

Italian merchants started coming to Argentina and Uruguay, its neighbor across

the Rio de la Plata delta, shortly after their independence in the 1820s. In fact, the

famed Italian nationalist and revolutionary of the mid-nineteenth century, Giuseppi

Garibaldi, ﬁrst wore his trademark red shirt ﬁghting for the Colorados (Reds) of

Uruguay in the regional war of the 1840s for ascendancy in the Rio de la Plata.

Uruguayans call this conﬂict their Great War. It pitted the cosmopolitan local allies of

recent European immigrants who advocated an openness to European liberal ideas

and economies against creole proponents of a more insular “American” system.

The ﬁrst sizable contract labor migration from Italy to Argentina, however, took

place during the closing decades of the century, when Argentine ranchers sought

to take advantage of the opportunity created by an industrial Europe’s increasing

inability to feed itself, by adding grains and other food crops to their livestock on their

ranches in the rich soil of the pampa of central Argentina. These golondrinas—or

swallows—were the ﬁrst Italian migrants to grasp the opportunity created by this

leap of globalization across the equator. They were called golondrinas, because like

swallows they migrated with the seasons. In fact, they were probably the longest-

distance seasonal migrant laborers in history who took advantage of the difference in

the seasons between the Northern and Southern hemispheres to harvest the crops in

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

Italy and then take passage to Argentina literally in the steerage of the return passage

of ships that transported live cattle from Argentina to Italy.

Eventually, some of these Italian agricultural laborers chose to stay in Argentina,

a land where food was plentiful and meat was cheap, a new nation with greater

opportunities than hierarchical rural Italy, while others returned to Italy with tales

of gold in the streets and jewels in the sand that motivated friends and relatives to

cross the Atlantic. The dramatic increase in Italian immigration to Argentina during

the second half of the nineteenth century—which rose from less than 100,000 during

the 1860s to more than 640,000 during the 1880s—reﬂected both the agricultural

depression in northern Italy and the economic boom of the 1880s in South America,

when foreign investment multiplied and exports doubled in a region that was being

incorporated into an increasingly global economy centered on an industrializing

and urbanizing Europe that could no longer feed or clothe itself from its own rural

production. The resultant need for labor in both rural agriculture and urban export

processing drew large numbers of European immigrants to Argentina—2.5 million

between 1880 and 1930, the largest share of Latin America’s seven–nine million

immigrants during those decades—with Italians in the lead.

Entire villages in the Veneto, the depressed rural hill country near Venice,

were deserted in the 1880s by their young men, all of whom seemed to have gone to

Argentina. When the Italian government became alarmed at this depopulation and

decided to investigate, what it found was a pattern—and a story—that repeated itself

in village after village.

On a Sunday morning before Mass, an elegant stranger arrived in the village,

impeccably dressed in black. He joined the promenade around the central square,

dofﬁng his top hat to the ladies and setting them abuzz with questions about who

he might be and whether or not he was an eligible bachelor. When Mass began

he entered the village church and took a prominent place in a front pew. When the

service was over, he sat down at the best table in the best café and ordered the most

expensive drink on the menu.

Then, when the young men who gathered in the square could no longer restrain

their curiosity, he invited them to join him and ordered them an expensive drink as

well. They asked him where he was from, and he was always from a village close

enough so that they had heard of it, but far enough away so that they didn’t have any

relatives there.

When the church clock struck noon the stranger took out his big gold watch to

check the time, while their eyes grew bigger and bigger. How could someone from a

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

village like their own have become so rich and prosperous? The stranger replied: Only

a few years before, he had been a poor peasant like themselves, without hopes for a

better future. “And then, and then…?” they demanded. “And then,” he declared, “I

went to Argentina!” They too could be like him. All it took was a few years and a little

hard work

The elegant stranger was an agent for a steamship line, which was in turn

subsidized by the Argentine government and private landowners as part of a policy

of encouraging European immigration, both to “whiten” and “civilize” the mixed-

race population, and to secure experienced farmers to add export agriculture to rural

Argentina’s largely livestock economy. Before he left town, he signed up all the young

men he could persuade to ship out to Argentina.

They would have to pay for their passage by working for a landowner for three

to ﬁve years as indentured labor, breaking up the hard sod, farming a huge 500-acre

plot, and turning his ranch into a farm with their strong arms and knowledge of

agriculture. When their voluntary servitude was over, they would leave the estate

planted with grains and ﬂax—and the alfalfa needed to feed the rancher’s new

reﬁned livestock. Part of their commitment was to leave these improvements to the

landowner when their contract expired. But then they could leave to seek their own

fortune—what Argentines called “hacer América” and in the United States we call

“the American Dream.”

Most had been peasants in Europe and aspired to land of their own, but few

found it. Argentina did not have the equivalent of the U.S. Homestead Act

until much

too late, and then the lands available were poor lands distant from transportation and

markets. The Argentine pampas were plains with extraordinary rich, well-watered

soils, but these lands were already owned by Argentine elites and their value had

multiplied with the building of railways and the boom in pastoral and agricultural

exports.

Some Italian immigrants banded together in cooperatives to buy land in less

pricey regions. But most drifted back to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s chief port and

political capital, where they could at least enjoy the society of other Italians and hope

to ﬁnd jobs in the booming export economy. During the boom of the 1880s, their

American dreams seemed within reach, but their hopes were dashed when boom

turned to bust in 1890—and Italian immigrants went jobless and homeless. Some

gave up and returned to Italy, but most remained and rode out the storm, turning their

trials and disappointments into the early tangos that they wrote, sang, and danced in

3. The Homestead Act was an act passed by U.S. Congress in 1862, giving unsettled land in the West to persons willing to

build on the land and develop it.

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

the bars and brothels of La Boca, the port of Buenos Aires. It became a largely Italian

area, where they lived in single-room occupancy slums known as conventillos, along

with equally poor immigrants from other parts of Europe and the Middle East. By

1890, Buenos Aires was mostly a foreign-born city, where “gringo” meant Italian, not

Anglo-American.

This was a development that alarmed the Argentine elite that had initially

encouraged this mass transatlantic immigration, but now saw their concentration

in the country’s capital as a threat to national identity and political stability. The

immigrants brought with them from Europe not only their strong arms and labor

skills but also revolutionary ideologies such as anarchism and socialism. Soon they

were regarded by the elite as a threat to public order, the core of what would become

known as “the social question,” where social inequality and ethnic exclusion became

a charged political issue—and like immigration in the United States today, one that

prompted government repression and provoked vigilante violence.

This view of immigration as a menace was reinforced when Italian anarchists

took the lead in contesting the Argentine elite’s self-congratulatory national centenary

celebrations in 1910, and again in the social unrest of the deep recession that followed

World War I. Hundreds of Italian immigrants became the ﬁrst victims of the deadly

antiimmigrant repression known as La Semana Trágica—the Tragic Week—of 1919.

It began as a strike in a factory staffed by Italian immigrant labor, organized by

anarchist “agitators,” but ended in a massacre that left hundreds of poor immigrants

dead and thousands wounded by security forces and civilian vigilantes organized by

the rightist “Patriotic League,” in an outburst of elite xenophobia.

During the decades that followed, the Italian immigrants—and their children and

grandchildren—gradually integrated into Argentine society, adding their slang to the

local language and pasta and pizza to the tables of Argentina.

Their integration was

symbolized by the presidential election in 1946 of populist leader Juan Peron, himself

of mixed Italian and Spanish ancestry (Argentina’s two main European ethnic roots).

His decade in power saw their further integration with the new wave of mixed race

4. For a concise, accessible account of the Semana Trágica set within its historical and social context, see Peter Winn,

Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean, 3rd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of

California, 2006), Chapter 3.

5. This gradual assimilation can be traced in the letters between members of an extended Italian family on both sides of the

Atlantic edited by Samuel Baily and Franco Ramella, One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s Correspondence Across

the Atlantic, 1901–1922 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Excerpts from these letters would make good

primary source documents for students. For an interesting comparison to Italian immigration to the United States during

this same era, see also Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), in which Baily concludes that the integration of Italian immigrants into the

receiving society was greater in Buenos Aires than in New York.

6. For a comprehensive, prize-winning history of Spanish immigration to Buenos Aires during the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, see José Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley and

Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

migrants from the Andean interior into a powerful working class, although Peron also

restricted further immigration to Argentina to white Europeans.

This Italo-Argentine synthesis of Italy and Argentina was so complete and

successful that it was a shock when thousands of Argentines of Italian descent

lined up outside the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires in the deep economic crisis of

2001–2002—itself a result of globalization and the Argentine neoliberal response to its

challenges—to reclaim the Italian passports that their grandparents had surrendered.

Their goal was a return migration to their ancestral homeland in search of work and a

better future than they saw possible in the Argentina where they had been born and

raised.

Admittedly, it was a crisis so acute and sustained that unemployment soared

to 40 percent and most Argentines fell into poverty in a country that was one of the

richest in the world less than a century ago, while many Argentines were starving

in one of the world’s great bread baskets. Still, for a country that had been a land of

immigrants, not emigrants—the country in Latin America with the largest middle

class, where the South American version of the American Dream had seemed easiest

to realize—it was a shock.

During those ﬁrst years of the twenty-ﬁrst century, an estimated 300,000

Argentines left their country in search of jobs and better futures elsewhere. Most went

to Europe, where labor shortages offered good job opportunities, and European Union

citizenship policies enabled Argentines of Italian and Spanish descent to “reclaim”

EU passports and once in Europe work wherever they wanted. Although most may

have been Italian in origin, because of the shared language, the vast majority ended

up in Spain, which by 2004 was home to nearly 160,000 native-born Argentines—a

reﬂection as well of the booming Spanish economy’s expanding labor needs.

Far fewer ended up staying in Italy—although the 11,000 Argentines there are

the largest group among the 45,000 Latin Americans working and living in Italy. So

far, there have been few studies of those Argentines who did stay, of how they assess

their “return” migration to the land of their ancestors. Most of the evidence we have is

anecdotal—so I will end this part of my essay with an anecdote of my own:

A few years ago, I was dining at an outdoor table in Trastevere in Rome, where

a singer was doing the rounds of the tables singing Neapolitan love songs. His Italian

was excellent, but I detected a slight familiar accent. So I asked him in Spanish where

he was from and he responded in Spanish: “Buenos Aires.” I am an oral historian, so I

began to ask for his life story. He had been living and working in Italy since the crisis,

he explained. It was a better living and he had married and was doing well, he said,

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

but he still carried Argentina in his corazón—his heart—which he poured into the

nostalgic tango that he sang for me. As with the Italian immigrants to Buenos Aires of

his grandparents’ generation, the tango continued to serve as a vehicle for immigrant

longings and dreams—and even successful immigrants felt like exiles in their hearts.

II. Migration from and to Japan and Brazil

When Peron banned nonwhite immigration to Argentina in the mid-twentieth century,

one of the groups whose presence in his “white” nation that he wanted to restrict was

the Japanese. By then, the Japanese had already formed a large community within

Brazil, Argentina’s neighbor and rival, which had become home to the largest overseas

population of Japanese descent outside Hawaii.

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867), Japanese emigration had been

prohibited. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), which followed and opened Japan

to the outside world, the Japanese government itself promoted emigration as a way

of dealing with unemployment and rural overpopulation, and as a source of income

via emigrant remittances. Moreover, the dislocations caused by Japan’s rapid

modernization and industrialization caused widespread rural poverty and distress.

During this era, half a million Japanese emigrated, most of them to nearby Manchuria

or Korea or to Paciﬁc islands like Hawaii, where Japanese composed 40 percent of the

population by the U.S. takeover in 1898.

It was not until the end of the Meiji period, when Japanese immigration began

to meet resistance elsewhere, that Japanese began to migrate to Brazil. Brazil had

promoted immigration during the closing decades of the nineteenth century as a

replacement for the African slave labor that it ﬁnally abolished in 1888. But, as in

Argentina, it was European immigration that its coffee planters had subsidized, in

return for contract labor on their plantations. From 1880 to 1900, 1.6 million Europeans

arrived in Brazil, half of them from Italy and most of the rest from Iberia. But Brazilian

plantation owners, used to slave labor, treated their European workers like slaves, and

the Italian and Spanish governments responded by forbidding new emigration, while

many of the earlier immigrants left the plantations as soon as they could.

This created a rural labor shortage that Brazil’s planters and the government

they dominated thought they would once again ﬁll with nonwhite workers. They

considered the importation of Chinese coolie labor, but rejected it on racial grounds.

Japanese were also racially problematic in a country whose racial policy was to

whiten the population through miscegenation, but Brazil’s economy depended on its

coffee exports, the biggest in the world, and Brazilian coffee planters needed labor.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Moreover, the Japanese had acquired prestige in Brazil because of their victory in the

Russo-Japanese War, so they were considered superior Asians. As a consequence

of this conﬂuence of concerns, in 1907, the São Paulo state government agreed to

subsidize contract Japanese plantation labor, arranged with the help of the Japanese

government.

The ﬁrst group of Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil in 1908, with little

knowledge of their new land, but with high hopes of earning enough money in ﬁve

years of plantation work to buy land of their own or to return to Japan with resources

and their heads held high. Instead they found work that was hard and difﬁcult under

foremen who had been slave drivers and treated the contract laborers the same way

as they had slaves. The conditions were so different from those promised by the

Japanese emigration company that some migrants rebelled and left the plantations,

especially when the steamship company failed to return the moneys they had

deposited at the start of the journey.

This is a story told as a microhistory in Gaijin, a prize-winning ﬁlm made in

1980 by the then-young Japanese Brazilian director Tizuka Yamasaki, based on

the experience of her 101-year-old grandmother, who had told it to her as family oral

history.

It is a “docudrama” social history ﬁlm that would work well in a classroom

and allow students to share the experience of these Japanese labor migrants, far from

home and facing discrimination, exploitation, and manipulation in a strange cultural

setting. The Japanese are isolated in part because of their language but even more

because of the insularity of their culture. Because the Brazilians wanted to make

sure the migrants would not ﬂee the plantation, they insisted on the migration of

families, which led to the creation of ﬁctive families, with husbands and wives “of

convenience.”

This is the story of Yamasaki’s grandmother in Gaijin, which is a pejorative

Japanese word for “outsider” or “foreigner.” Her Japanese husband of convenience

dies of a tropical disease, while other migrants commit suicide or ﬂee the plantation.

The dramatic culmination of the ﬁlm, however, is when the enraged Italian workers

go on strike while the uncomprehending Japanese migrants continue working. This

leads the plantation owner to order: “Hire Japanese workers. They work hard. Not like

the Italians and the Spaniards, who are troublemakers.” Yet, by the end of the ﬁlm, a

liaison between Yamasaki’s grandmother and a socially conscious Brazilian points to

a different future in a Brazil that prided itself on being a racial democracy in which

racial mixing was both common and a path to integration. It would be a very gradual

7. It would be interesting to have students do oral histories of their own family’s immigrant generation or as far back as family

memory carries—and then to compare these stories to those in Gaijin or Baily and Ramello’s Italian family correspondence.

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

assimilation, however, for a Japanese Brazilian community that would also try hard to

maintain their traditions and identity.

Yamasaki’s grandmother was among the ﬁrst of the nearly quarter of a million

Japanese who would migrate to Brazil over the next 50 years, most of them in

the 1920s. It was a migration ofﬁcially promoted and subsidized by a Japanese

government fearful of overpopulation, and by Japanese investors eager to develop

a Brazilian source of cotton for an expanding Japanese textile industry. Japanese

migrants became colonos who cleared the forests, prepared the land for the coffee

plants, did the planting, tended the plants, and harvested the beans. In the rows

between the coffee plants, they grew food crops and earned money selling surplus

food and doing odd jobs. They also earned a ﬁxed sum for every 1,000 plants and for

every sack of coffee beans, but this was much less than the emigration agencies had

promised—only 20 percent of the wages paid in Hawaii.

Many ﬂed the plantations and took refuge in the cities or in working for

railway companies. Once they left their tight-knit Japanese community, they often

intermarried with Brazilians and assimilated to the dominant culture. But 70 percent

became small farmers on the expiration of their colono contract. They were helped

in acquiring land by the coffee glut that led landowners to sell off parts of their

plantations—very different from the high price of land that was a problem for Italian

migrants in Argentina—and by the Japanese cultural tradition of banding together in

mutual aid credit associations.

With the encouragement of Japanese industrialists, many became cotton

farmers. But most became truck farmers around large cities like São Paulo, and by

1935, Japanese farmers produced 80 percent of the vegetables for Brazil’s economic

capital.

Others retreated to Japanese colonies in the Amazon, ethnic enclaves where they

could live as Japanese—reproducing family patterns, religious rituals, and cultural

mores. There they created Japanese schools, medical services, associations, and

newspapers. Some of these communities were so isolated that they refused to believe

that Japan had been defeated in World War II, while others streamed to the coast like

a messianic sect because of the rumor that the Emperor had sent a ship to take them

back to Japan.

World War II was a big divide for the Japanese Brazilian community in other

ways as well. Brazilian paranoia about an alleged Japanese plot to use the Amazon as

a naval base led the Brazilian government to restrict Japanese newspapers, schools,

and public gatherings in the Japanese language, and to press the Japanese into a

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

compulsory assimilation program. After Pearl Harbor, internment camps were set up

in Brazil, and Japanese were told to move from the coast, but these measures never

reached U.S. levels.

After the war, Japanese emigration to Brazil resumed, although on a smaller

scale and not in as culturally isolated a fashion. Before, many of the immigrants had

deﬁned themselves as temporary labor migrants or Dekasegi Imin. Now they saw

themselves as permanent settlers in a new homeland, as “ex-Japanese” —Nikkeijin,

foreigners of Japanese descent. Even more important, second- and third-generation

Japanese Brazilians—the Nisei and Sansei—learned Portuguese, were educated in

Brazilian schools and universities, and began to make their way in Brazilian society.

They still retained a strong sense of their Japanese roots, but now it was a Nikkeijin

identity, as Brazilians of Japanese descent, which was “chameleonlike”—at times

Japanese at other times Brazilian. Although the Nikkeijin faced some discrimination,

by the 1980s they had emerged as the model minority, whose educational level,

incomes, and professional status exceeded the Brazilian average. They had become so

successful and well regarded that Japanese culture and food had become fashionable

among non-Japanese Brazilians.

By 1990, there was a Japanese Brazilian community

of more than 1.2 million, the largest overseas Japanese descent community (outside

Hawaii) in the world.

Yet those same decades of the 1980s and 1990s would see the beginnings of a

return migration to Japan as contract laborers of those second- and third-generation

Nisei and Sansei, the children and grandchildren of those Japanese contract laborers

who migrated to Brazil earlier in the twentieth century. This return migration would

lead to 280,000 Japanese Brazilians living and working in Japan by 2004. It was a

development that had both Japanese and Brazilian roots, and involved a working

misunderstanding on both sides.

During the closing decades of the twentieth century, Japan, with an expanding

economy and low population growth, was facing a labor crisis. It was solving

this crisis by importing foreign “guest workers” from other Asian countries, from

Communist China to Islamic Pakistan. But their presence and behavior in a largely

monoethnic and insular Japan was creating a problem. So it occurred to the Japanese

to instead bring in as guest workers ethnically Japanese Brazilians, whom they

assumed would ﬁt easily into Japan.

8. Nikkeijin — Persons born in Japan or descendents of persons born in Japan who have assimilated into their new societies;

Nisei — A person of Japanese descent, born outside of Japan, usually in the Americas; Sansei — Child of Nisei born in the

new society (third generation).

9. For a thoughtful and complex discussion of these issues, see Daniela de Carvalho, Migrants and Identity in Japan and

Brazil: The Nikeijin (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. Chapters 3 and 5.

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

Before 1980, Brazilians rarely emigrated: Why would you want to leave Brazil,

with its vibrant culture, beautiful landscape, and an economy that had been among

the fastest growing in the world for a century? The Latin American debt crisis of the

1980s—with its high unemployment and hyperinﬂation—changed that attitude, and

Brazilians began to migrate to other countries in large numbers for the ﬁrst time.

Japanese Brazilians retained an idealized image of Japan and were uniformly

referred to as japones in Brazil. So they returned to Japan as contract laborers with

high hopes and expectations of large earnings, and being embraced by the Japan

that their grandparents had come from a century before. Both the Japanese and

the Japanese Brazilians were doomed to disappointment. Neither side had their

expectations fulﬁlled.

Japanese Brazilians were given what the Japanese called “3D” jobs: “dirty,

difﬁcult, and dangerous.” Moreover, the treatment Japanese Brazilian workers received

in these work sectors was demeaning, particularly for those who had been middle

class and had enjoyed a high status in Brazil. Nor were they welcomed with open arms

in Japan and viewed as prodigal sons. On the contrary, they faced discrimination and

were regarded as gaijin (foreigners). They remained in Japan because of the money—

wages that were sky-high compared to Brazil—but they ﬁlled mostly low-skill jobs and

resented both their treatment and their inability to transcend it.

The Japanese who had brought them “home” felt equally disappointed in the

result. The Japanese Brazilians might be ethnically Japanese, but they were culturally

Brazilian. As a result, they did not behave “properly”: They dressed and talked too

loudly, were never on time, and sang and danced in too sexy a way. Foreigners were

not expected to behave like Japanese, but because Japanese Brazilians looked

Japanese, people would scold them in a language they barely understood for not

behaving like a good Japanese. As a result, the Japanese Brazilians were slotted into

the bottom of Japanese society as a new ethnic minority group—like the Korean

Japanese, the Ainu, and the Okinawans—and discriminated against like these other

“inferior” ethnicities.

Yet despite these mutual disappointments, the numbers of Japanese Brazilian

contract workers in Japan has grown to more than a quarter of a million. Today,

these Nikkeijin are the second-largest group of the 800,000 foreign workers in Japan

(after the Chinese). As one study concluded: “They are by far the largest and most

important source of legal migrant labor in Japan, on which many Japanese industries

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

now depend. [Japanese Brazilians] have assumed a critical function in the Japanese

economy as a ﬂexible and relatively cheap labor force.”

But their low wages in Japanese terms are many times more than what even

middle-class professionals can earn in Brazil, allowing them to send money home to

help support their families. Together, they send back to Brazil $3 billion in remittances

annually, equal to 6 percent of Brazil’s exports. This is why you have Brazilian teachers

doing unskilled manual labor in Japan that they would never do in Brazil. Moreover, a

third of pornography ads in Japan now feature Japanese Brazilians—who are viewed

as the sexy “other” because of the way they move and dance. This represents another

demeaning occupational niche for Japanese Brazilians, most of whom do not dance

samba in Brazil.

One result of this disappointment and humiliation is that many Japanese

Brazilians work a few years in Japan and then return with their savings to Brazil—

these are the dekasegi temporary migrant workers. But when they return home, many

ﬁnd it hard to work in Brazil for so much less than they can earn in Japan and become

“circle migrants,” who remain in Brazil until the money is spent and then return to

Japan to work. In a way, they are a twenty-ﬁrst-century version of the nineteenth-

century Italian golondrinas.

But other Japanese Brazilians choose to settle permanently in Japan. Like their

grandparents who migrated the other way, they bring over their families and make

the best of it, despite their feelings of being excluded and discriminated against.

What is common to their experience of both countries is being regarded as a minority.

But the difference is that where they were viewed as a positive minority in Brazil,

they are seen as a negative minority in Japan. In Brazil, the Nikkeijin were ethnically

distinguished as “so Japanese,” but in Japan, they are ethnically disparaged as “so

Brazilian.” Like immigrants elsewhere, they are also blamed for “many problems”—

”they ﬁght and quarrel,” “they have car accidents,” “they do not pay,” “they steal.”

This is very different from the model minority image of Japanese Brazilians in Brazil.

The impact on individuals and their identity has been profound, and not what

either they or academics had predicted. Many came to Japan expecting to be

embraced and to reinforce their Japanese identity. Instead, they were excluded as

“Brazilians” and this reinforced their Brazilian identity. As one young man put it: “I

am now certain that I am more Brazilian than Japanese—I found this out in Japan….

Being seen as a foreigner in Japan despite my Japanese face was a shock that I will

10. Takeyuki Tsuda, Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective

(New York: Columbia University, 2003), xii. Excerpts used by permission of Columbia University Press.

11. Quoted in De Carvalho, Migrants and Identity, 141.

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

never forget.”

As a result, Nikkei migrants who never danced samba or participated

in Carnival in Brazil do so in Japan “to express their Brazilianness.”

For others, this initial nationalistic Brazilian response is followed by a more

balanced view: “I discovered my Brazilianness in Japan and now I feel much more

Brazilian than I did in Brazil,” one Nikkei explained. “But my Brazilian feelings do not

continue to become stronger over time. After the ﬁrst shock I received in Japan, I felt

a sudden rise in my Brazilian consciousness, but then the confusion ended. Now I can

see both the Japanese and Brazilian sides of myself objectively.”

Or as one Japanese

Brazilian put it: “Between karaoke and samba I won’t choose. I want to keep the best

of both.”

To the Japanese, the Japanese Brazilians were “weirdos,” as one young man

put it. “They looked Japanese, but they weren’t real Japanese. They acted completely

different, spoke a foreign tongue, and dressed in strange ways. They were like

fake Japanese, like a fake superhero you see on TV.”

For a Brazilian, who “was

the Japanese [in Brazil]…brought up as a weird Brazilian…in a world where there

were us [the Nikkei] and the Gaijin [other Brazilians],” this Japanese response was

both “confusing” and painful.

Yet anthropologists who have studied the Japanese

Brazilians in Japan believe that their children, who are attending Japanese schools

and internalizing Japanese mores and values, will overcome their minority status and

disappear into Japanese society:

My sister’s daughter now thinks completely like a Japanese. She doesn’t want to

return to Brazil because she thinks Japan is the best. Because of these images

she gets from Japanese society, she thinks Brazil is a poor, backward society

populated by armed bandits…. She even asked my sister…if Brazil has televisions.

Because Japanese Brazilians are a cultural minority in Japan, not a racial minority

like the Korean Japanese, scholars believe that these children will disappear into the

majority populace through cultural assimilation and social mobility because their

ethnicity is not racially essentialized. As a local Japanese ofﬁcial in the provincial

town of Oizumi explained:

If the Nikkeijin children eventually learn to speak the language ﬂuently and to

behave just like the Japanese, they will be accepted as Japanese. I believe the

12.Quoted in Tsuda, Strangers, 367-68.

13. De Carvalho, Migrants and Identity, 137.

14. Quoted in Tsuda, Strangers, 368.

15. Jornal Tudo Bem, March 28, 1998. Quoted in De Carvalho, Migrants and Identity, 140.

16. Quoted in Tsuda, Strangers, x.

17. Quoted in De Carvalho, Migrants and Identity, 140.

18. Quoted in Tsuda, Strangers, 391.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Brazilian Nikkeijin are fundamentally different from the Korean Japanese because

they are of Japanese descent. The Japanese believe in kettoshugi (the principle of

descent and blood ties). As we say, “blood is thicker than water.”

Oizumi may be the best test of that belief. It is the Japanese municipality with the

highest concentration of foreigners, and nearly four-ﬁfths of them are Brazilian. As

a result, it is known as Samba no Machi—the City of Samba—and its Carnival has

become a Japanese tourist attraction. By 1997, half of the babies born in Oizumi were

Brazilian and by 2002 there were more than ﬁfty Brazilian-owned businesses with

more than 4,000 customers weekly. Facing a labor shortage in its manufacturing

industries that this Brazilian immigration has solved, Oizumi’s ofﬁcials have tried

hard to integrate Brazilians into local society. Yet, one local resident complained that

the number of Brazilians and their alien cultural style made her “feel a foreigner in her

own city.”

Clearly, the return migration to Japan of Japanese Brazilians—like the original

migration of their grandparents from Japan to Brazil—is a complex story, involving

many of the themes and issues of world history on both a macro and micro level. It

would be a fascinating addition to a world history course. Fortunately, because it has

fascinated both media and scholars there is a lot published on it. Moreover, to tell the

micro story, Tizuka Yamasaki has recently released her follow-up ﬁlm to Gaijin, which,

to underscore the comparison, she has called Gaijin 2. It follows Japanese Brazilians

through the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of their return to Japan.

There are also suggestive microstories in recent books like Takeyuki Tsuda’s

Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland, which begins with a revealing, descriptive

anecdote:

The train slows as it rolls into Shibuyu station in Tokyo. It is past rush hour on the

Yamanote line, but the car is still full with commuters. Outside on the station platform

await hundreds of passengers. The doors open, allowing the passengers to shufﬂe out

and a new group to ﬁle into the train in an orderly manner. Most of the men are dressed

conservatively in suits...Finally, just before the doors shut, a group of three men stroll

in. Compared to those who preceded them, these Japanese appear quite different.

Their demeanor is casual and leisurely. Two of them are dressed in shirts of bright,

mixed colors and jeans with a stripe down the seam. The third wears a t-shirt that

says “Brasil.” They continue their conversation, speaking loudly in Portuguese….

19. Quoted in Tsuda, Strangers, 395.

20. Quoted in De Carvalho, Migrants and Identity, 136.

South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants

Instantly, the three men become the objects of peculiar glances from the surrounding

Japanese. Some look up from their newspapers. Others pretend not to notice these

strangers. Two Japanese women sitting beside me turn their eyes away from the men

and look at each other. They exchange one word: “Gaijin!”

21. Tsuda, Strangers, ix.

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina

and Brazil: Bringing Immigration

Scholarship into the Classroom

Rick Warner

Wabash College

Crawfordsville, Indiana

South American Immigration: Historical Context

Argentina is a nation of immigrants. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which

is a vibrant historical connection to the global economy, Argentina absorbed many

people especially in the last third of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the

twentieth century, half of Buenos Aires was populated by people who had been born

elsewhere, a rather unusual statistic for that day.

To a degree, Argentine immigration was intentional. Elite Argentines saw

economic opportunities in expanding the workforce to serve the export economy, one

of the key aspects of the liberal ideology of the period. As with other Latin American

elites, in Brazil for instance, they held a preference for northern European immigrants,

who would civilize and “whiten” the populace. For the most part, however, this is not

who they managed to attract. The most common immigrant came from Italy, where

the political climate at the time was turbulent. Thus, many of the new arrivals carried

with them interests in labor organizing and even anarchism. Lesser known to history

but also important were immigrants from Asia, in particular from Japan. These folks

were also integrated into the growing export economy.

Curiously enough, immigration sometimes has a rebound effect. Immigrants

rarely know how long their stay will be in the destination country, though returning

to their homeland is often problematic. The decision to migrate, and to return, is

a complicated matter of identity as much as it is an economic question. There are

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

always numerous “push” and “pull” factors at work, and this is certainly the case

in Argentine history. These complicated and various reasons, and the cultural and

national identity aspects that surround them, are the subject of much modern Latin

American historiography.

Synopsis

For this lesson, students will read a recent article by Peter Winn, “South America:

Land of Immigrants—and Emigrants: Italian and Japanese Migration to Argentina

and Brazil” Winn offers some fascinating information regarding the peculiarities of

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration by Italians to Argentina and

Japanese to Brazil. There is plenty of historical information for students to chew on:

stories as well as statistics, and good indications of the reasons for these migrations.

The article is somewhat unique in that Winn also describes the phenomenon of

“reverse migration,” as Italians and Japanese return to their “homelands,” sometimes

many years after the original migration. The reception that Italians and Japanese

receive on both sides of the ocean is representative and causative of their own

perceptions of national identity. Japanese Brazilians in particular ﬁnd that they do not

“ﬁt in” when they return to Japan after so many years.

In sum, the content of the article can provoke rich discussions, using some

critical thinking questions. This should surely be one objective of the lesson.

However, since the focus is on historical interpretation, the lesson should also involve

an appreciation of the work of the historian. What questions does Winn ask? Why

does he ask these? How does he answer these questions? The lesson aims to move

students to higher-order thinking about written history but attempting to ascertain

the point of view and method of the author.

Goals and Objectives

The basic objective of this exercise is to introduce students to the notion of historical

interpretation, in a rudimentary yet clear fashion.

After completing the exercise, students will be able to:

• IdentifydiversecausesofimmigrationtoandfromSouthAmerica

• Recognizethevalueofacomparativeapproachinhistoriography

• Begintothinkcriticallyabouttheworkofhistorians

AP World History Habits of Mind

Although a number of AP goals may be met, the lesson is principally constructed to

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina and Brazil

introduce students to:

• Understanddiversityofinterpretations(rst-categoryhabitofmind)

• Comparewithinandamongsocieties(second-categoryhabitofmind)

Lesson Plan

Student Preparation

Students are expected to read the article prior to class. Many students may beneﬁt

from the following questions.

• WhatwerethereasonsforimmigrationfromItalytoArgentina?

• WhatwerethereasonsforimmigrationfromJapantoBrazil?

• WhatwereArgentinaandBrazillookingforinimmigrants?

• Howdidtheencounterbetweenimmigrantand“native”differbetweenthe

countries? Contrast the reaction of South Americans to immigrants.

• Whatdoyouimaginearethereasonsforthedifferences?

• Whatlargerglobalquestionsorissuesdoesthearticleraise,beyond

these places?

Introduce the Subject of Immigration

Just as history is always written from the present, which inﬂuences our interpretation,

it is also learned from a speciﬁc individualized context. Put simply, your students are

aware of and have likely formed opinions and questions about immigration in the

world today. Rather than ignore these views, they can be used as a “hook.”

Plan #1

Have the students ask about immigration stories at their home to share in small

groups or the class. N.B.: You must know your class well. Imagine asking this

question of undocumented immigrants! Another method is to have them interview a

friend, though with some populations you may ﬁnd difﬁculties there as well. African

American students may or may not appreciate the assignment as well, but their

family histories can be even more revealing, as those of us old enough to remember

Roots know. Each teacher must ﬁnd a comfortable solution to this sort of exercise. The

classroom has to be a safe space. One interesting question to ask students whose

ancestors came from non-English-speaking places is whether and when the native

tongue fell into disuse. One great irony of current “English only” discourse is that ﬁrst-

generation immigrants rarely picked up English, and by the fourth generation very

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

few continue to speak the native tongue in the home, which suggests that “foreign”

language is not a long-term threat.

Plan #2

Initiate a class discussion about current immigration issues. List the problems on

the board ﬁrst. Acknowledge that many people feel uncomfortable with immigration,

without casting any judgments. Then, ask students to take out a small piece of paper

and list some reasons they think that immigrants might want to leave their country,

and why they might be drawn to ours. Ask them to list at least two challenges or

difﬁculties that immigrant families might face.

Working with the Article

The previous exercise will hopefully accomplish two goals. First, students should be

able to make a personal connection with the ﬁgure of the immigrant, which is more

powerful pedagogically than the sort of statistics and pitched debate that the subject

often offers. Second, students may become curious about “push” and “pull” factors,

which are critical in historical analysis of migration.

Content

Regardless of the caliber of your students, analysis of a historiographical assignment

should begin at the base level of historical content. Put simply, the group should

understand what the author is attempting to communicate before proceeding to

analyze her or his method.

For this particular article, creating a chart to contrast push and pull factors is

recommended. Push factors are reasons to leave the mother country, and pull factors

are reasons to migrate to the object country. Often enough, these are related. This

task can be effectively completed by splitting up the class into Argentina and Brazil

teams, and perhaps further by push and pull teams. Have them scour speciﬁc places

in the text that discuss push and pull factors in the migration to South America.

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina and Brazil

Teachers may want to assign this graphic organizer with the reading:

Push Factors Push Factors Pull Factors Pull Factors

Italy - Push

Poor economy

Argentina - Pull

Export economy

Japan - Push

Meiji promotion of

emigration

Brazil - Pull

Labor shortage,

end of slavery

There are other ways to organize such a chart, but this helps to see similarities as well

as differences. Ideally several examples will be placed in each square. Another grid

can be created for the question of “return migration,” listing reasons for Japanese and

Italians to return to Japan and Europe, respectively. Do not stop here! Closure to this

section is required by searching for themes. This can be accomplished cooperatively,

asking students if they see patterns of similarity or difference. List these on one side

of the board.

Turn now to more speciﬁc questions about the article. These issues will require

closer attention to the text and might beneﬁt from work in groups. Find speciﬁc places

that speak to:

• ReceptionthatimmigrantsreceivedinArgentina

• ReceptionthatimmigrantsreceivedinBrazil

• ReceptionthatreturnimmigrantsreceivedinItalyandJapan

• Issuesofraceandethnicity

• Specichistoricalevents,suchastheTragicWeekof1919

• Issuesofnationalidentity

Groups should report out. The instructor should list ﬁndings according to immigrant

group. Once again, search for themes in open discussion with the class.

Method

Now turn to a discussion of how the article is put together. Begin slowly by recapping

your own comparative method. How does Winn use this method to explain trends

in migration? Why do you think that he chose these places? What do students think

about doing comparative history? What advantages does comparative history have

as a method, and what does it not achieve? These are purposefully open-ended

questions, meant to encourage discussion of the process of doing history.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Once students are comfortable with discussing at this level, ask students to

imagine the work of the historian with more complexity. Engage them in discussion of

• TheuseofindividualstoriesintheWinnarticle,suchasfromthelm

Gaijin.

• TheuseormisuseofchronologybyWinn:Ishecomparingappleswith

oranges?

• Thesubtleandunclearconstructionof“identity”inthearticle.

• Thecentralargumentorthesisofthepiece,ifitcanbefound!

• IsWinnsaying“youcannevergohome”?Whatmightthatmean?

• WhatmightWinnbesayingtootherhistorians?Whatistheoverall

importance of the piece?

• WhatsourcesdoesWinnuse?Whatsortsofsources might have been

useful?

• WhatquestionsareNOTansweredbyWinn?

Closure

Return to the original discussion of immigration in our own world. Are students

thinking differently about some of the questions raised in the original discussion? If

these have been saved they can be put on the board or on a handout. Now that you

know more about why immigrants made the choices that they did and were received

in the ways that they were in Argentina and Brazil, what similarities and differences

do you see with immigration today? Which problems have persisted, and which ones

have changed? How might Winn write about today’s immigrants, given his method in

writing about Japanese and Italians in the earlier period? This should move inevitably

to the question of why Winn has written his article, given the time we live in and

what sorts of questions are now interesting to world historians. Revisit the question of

a thesis.

Alternative Formats

One alternative format would be to replace part of this lesson with an examination

of review literature on global immigration. By reading a series of scholarly book

reviews, students can obtain an understanding of the conversation of historians that

underlies historical interpretation. Select scholarly reviews of books that deal with

global migration generally, and some that deal with the subject in the South American

context, to yield the widest results. Good sources of reviews include the Journal of

World History, World History Connected, H-WORLD, and the American Historical

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina and Brazil

Review. Students could report on the main points in the reviews, in terms of the

arguments that are made in these texts. These arguments can be contrasted with the

interpretive framework of Winn, and of the popular notions of immigration that began

the lesson.

Assessments

Summative Assessment

Short writing assignments during and at the end of the lesson can help ascertain the

level of student learning. These “minute papers” can be used both as an assessment

tool and as a spark for discussion.

A ﬁnal essay on the reasons for immigration in each case, asking students to

conclude something about the reasons for immigration patterns, would be a more

formal assessment. A longer essay might read: Contrast the economic and cultural

reasons for immigration and return for Italians and Japanese; which are the more

powerful reasons and why? At yet a higher level, the essay prompt might ask: What is

Winn arguing in this article? What sorts of evidence does he use to support his thesis,

and which of these evidences do you ﬁnd most compelling?

See below for a possible AP-style Compare and Contrast question and evaluation

rubric.

Formative Assessment

Short quizzes might be one possible formative assessment. Some possible short

answer questions follow. What have you learned about immigration from the article?

How does Winn present his material? Why do you think he is interested in this

subject? If you were a historian, what would you like to know about immigration to

Argentina and Brazil?

Bibliography

Baily, Samuel L. Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and

New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Baily, Samuel, and Franco Ramella, eds. One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s

Correspondence Across the Atlantic, 1901–1922. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 1988.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

De Carvalho, Daniela. Migrants and Identity in Japan and Brazil: The Nikkeijin. New

York: Routledge, 2002.

Gladin-Kramer, Amanda. “Professor Proﬁle: Peter Winn.” Tufts Observer, Feb. 11, 2005.

www.tuftsobserver.org/news/20050211/professor_proﬁle_peter_w.html

(accessed January 24, 2008).

Graham, Richard, et al., eds. The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940. Austin,

TX: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Masterson, Daniel, and Sayaka Funada. “The Japanese in Peru and Brazil: A

Comparative Perspective.” In Mass Migration to Modern Latin America, edited

by Samuel Baily and Eduard Miguez. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources,

2003.

Moya, José. Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930.

Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

Nugent, Walter T. K. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Solberg, Carl E. Immigration and Nationalism, Argentina and Chile, 1890–1914. Austin,

TX: University of Texas Press, 1970.

Tsuda, Takeyuki. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return

Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University, 2003.

Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean, 3rd

ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California, 2006.

Possible Free-Response Question and Rubric

The Question

Based on the information in the article, compare and contrast the reasons for

immigration and return among Japanese and Italian immigrants to Latin America.

Write an essay that:

• Hasarelevantthesisthataddressesbothgroups

• Analyzesrelevantreasonsfordifferencesbetweengroups

Global Cultural Encounters in Argentina and Brazil

• CitestheperspectiveofWinnthroughdirectquotationofthearticle

Grading Rubric

Based on AP scoring guidelines, 0–9 points possible.

Core Grading

1. Has acceptable thesis (addresses both groups, in ﬁrst paragraph) – 1 point

2. Addresses all parts of question, though not necessarily evenly – up to 2 points

a. Immigration to S. America

b. Return from S. America

c. Differences and similarities (a, b, and c for 2 points, two of these (a and

b, b and c, or c and a) for 1 point.)

3. Substantiates thesis with appropriate historical evidence – up to 2 points

4. Makes at least one or two relevant, direct comparisons between groups –

1 point

5. Analyzes at least one reason for one of these in #4 – 1 point

Expanded Core

0–2 points

Expands beyond basic core of 1–7 points, based on historical and writing skills:

• Particularlynuancedthesis

• Relatescomparisonstolargerglobalpatternsandconnections

• Suggestssimilaritieswithimmigrationinotherregions

• Critiquestheargumentoftheauthor(thiswouldbeparticularlyimpressive)

Understanding Global Migration

Through Charts

Adam McKeown

Columbia University

New York, New York

Objectives

• Understandbroadpatternsofglobalmigrationduringtherstwaveofmass

migration, 1840–1930.

• Learntoreadandanalyzechartsandgraphs.

• Findrelationshipsbetweenlarge-scalequantitativedataandmorelocaland

qualitative knowledge.

• Developcriticalhistoricalperspectivesonareadivisionsofworldhistory.

The mass migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a global

phenomenon. From the North Atlantic to the South Paciﬁc, hardly any corner of

the earth was untouched by migration. Although most scholarship and textbooks

have focused only on the transatlantic migrations, movement around the world was

actually similar in quantities and modes of organization. All were aspects of the

processes of globalization: the peopling of frontiers, new transportation technologies,

the production and processing of material for modern industry, the shipment and

marketing of ﬁnished goods, and the production of food, shelter, and clothing for

people who worked in those industrial and distribution networks. Yet even as the

causes and cycles of migration grew increasingly integrated across the globe, the

ﬂows themselves increasingly segregated into distinct regional systems in the

Atlantic, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. These regions corresponded with

different rates of economic growth and ideologies of cultural difference that have

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

obscured the many similarities in migration patterns and helped erase many of the

non-Atlantic migrations from the historical memory.

Large-scale patterns and changes over time are often best expressed through

tables, charts, and graphs. Not only is an effective chart able to condense a wide

range of information, but it can also make a strong visual impact that conveys a point

more powerfully than words. The skills necessary to read graphs include not only the

technical knowledge of how graphs convey information but also the interpretive skills

of understanding the implications of a chart, critiquing its limitations and drawing

connections to other historical processes and modes of interpretation. With the goal

of using charts to understand global migration in mind, this article will begin with a

brief overview of global migration and then discuss six charts that highlight different

patterns of global migration. Discussion points will focus on how to read the charts,

what they mean in relation to each other, and how they can be interpreted in the

context of other processes of world history at this time. More discussion and details,

as well as references to further reading and data sources, can be found in Adam

McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846-1940,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 155-89

(available online), and in the forum “Migration and World History: Reaching a New

Frontier,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 104-42.

Patterns of Global Migration

Table 1 divides transoceanic migration from 1840 to 1940 into three main systems.

The ﬁrst is the transatlantic system, from Europe and the Middle East to the

Americas. Nearly 65 percent of these migrants went to the United States, with the

bulk of the remainder divided between Argentina (which had the largest proportion

of foreign-born residents), Canada, Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Cuba and Uruguay.

Over half of the emigration before the 1870s was from the British Isles, with much of

the remainder from northwestern Europe. As migration increased along with new

transportation technologies in the 1880s, regions of intensive emigration spread south

and east as far as Portugal, Russia, and Syria. Up to 2.5 million migrants from South

and East Asia also traveled to the Americas, mostly to the frontiers of western North

America and the plantations of the Caribbean, Peru, and Brazil.

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

TABLE 1: GLOBAL LONG-DISTANCE MIGRATION, 1840–1940

Destination Origins Amount Auxiliary origins

Americas

Europe 55–58 million

2.5 million

from India, China

Japan, Africa

Southeast Asia

Indian Ocean Rim

Australasia

India

S. China

48–52 million

5 million

from Africa, Europe

NE Asia, Middle East

Manchuria, Siberia

Central Asia, Japan

NE Asia

Russia

46–51 million

The second major system is that of migrants from India and southern China to

Southeast Asia and islands through the South Paciﬁc and Indian Oceans. It consisted

of more than 29 million Indians, at least 19 million Chinese, and about 4.5 million

Europeans, the latter mostly to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. From

1870 to 1930 approximately 35 million migrants moved into the 4.08 million square

kilometers of Southeast Asia, compared to the 39 million migrants who moved into

the 9.8 million square kilometers of the United States. Most migration from India

was to colonies throughout the British Empire. Nearly four million Indians traveled

to Malaysia, more than eight million to Ceylon, more than 15 million to Burma, and

about a million to Africa and islands scattered from Mauritius to Fiji. Less than 8

percent of total migration from India was indentured to European planters at the time

of departure, mostly to distant places in the Americas, Africa, and Fiji. The proportion

declined over time, accounting for about a quarter of Indian emigration from 1840

to 1860 and quickly decreasing to an average of ﬁve percent a year after the 1870s,

until imposition of restrictions on indenture contracts in 1908 and the abolishment of

indenture in 1922 brought it down to nothing. Most Indian migrants still worked on

European plantations but usually moved and obtained jobs through Indian recruiters,

friends, or family, much like most European migrants working in the Americas. Up to

two million also migrated as merchants or travelers not intending to work as laborers.

The vast majority of Chinese migrants came from the southern provinces of

Guangdong and Fujian. Up to eleven million traveled from China to Singapore (the

second-biggest immigrant port in the world, after New York) from where more than

a third of the arriving migrants transshipped to the Dutch Indies, Borneo, Burma,

and places further west. Nearly four million traveled directly from China to Thailand,

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

between two and three million to French Indochina, more than a million directly to

the Dutch Indies, less than a million to the Philippines, and about half a million to

Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and other islands in the Paciﬁc and Indian oceans.

In the nineteenth century, the bulk of Chinese worked as craftsmen or in mines

and plantations in rural Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Australia, mostly in

partnerships or under Chinese employers. By the twentieth century, an increasingly

large proportion worked as small shopkeepers. Less than three-quarters of a million

Chinese migrants signed indenture contracts with European employers, including a

quarter million to Latin America and the Caribbean before 1874, a quarter million in

Sumatra from the 1880s to the 1910s, and a smaller number to mines, plantations, and

islands scattered throughout Malaya and the Paciﬁc and Indian oceans.

The third system is made up mostly of migrants from Russia and northeastern

Asia who moved into the broad expanse of land from Central Asia to Siberia and

Manchuria. In the 1860s, both the Russian and Chinese governments began to

encourage settlement in the distant border regions of Asia. Railroad construction in

the 1890s further strengthened the migrant ﬂows. At least 13 million Russians moved

into Central Asia and Siberia, usually under close government supervision by the

Imperial and Communist governments. Between 28 and 33 million Chinese migrated

into Manchuria and Siberia, along with nearly 2 million Koreans. Another 2.5 million

Koreans migrated to Japan, especially in the 1930s, and more than 2 million Japanese

also moved in to Korea and Manchuria. In addition, up to a million northern Chinese,

Koreans, and Japanese migrated to a diverse range of destinations, including much of

the Americas, Hawaii, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Europe.

These three systems are only the tip of the iceberg. For the most part, they only

count people who boarded ships in third class or were counted under government

resettlement efforts, as in Siberia. Many more migrants traveled overland, not passing

through ports and evading enumeration. Millions moved within each of the receiving

and sending regions and through places at the interstices of these three systems,

such as the six to eight million who moved into and out of Africa and the six to eight

million who moved between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Even the numbers

cited for these three systems must be treated as ballpark ﬁgures. People who traveled

ﬁrst class or were not categorized as “immigrants” were often not counted at ports.

Many people also evaded enumeration, something that became increasingly common

over time as immigration laws became more restrictive. The difﬁculties in counting

migration are apparent in comparing numbers from emigration and immigration

ports that sometimes vary by 20 percent or more. And even when immigration and

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

emigration numbers correspond, they often obscure multiple return trips by single

individuals.

Even with a potential error rate of 10 to 20 percent, we can still use these

numbers to understand broad trends and comparisons. At the very least, they

show that we must seriously entertain the idea that migration was a truly global

phenomena, not limited to the transatlantic migrations. From the perspective of

emigration, at ﬁrst glance 19 million overseas emigrants from China or 29 million

from India seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the several million from much

smaller countries like Italy, Norway, Ireland, and England. But if we adjust the focus

to regions of comparable size and population, the rates are very similar. Some peak

rates of overseas emigration from Europe in the 1910s are 10.8 emigrants per 1,000

population in Italy, 8.3 from Norway, and seven from Ireland. In comparison, the annual

average overseas emigration rate from Guangdong province in southern China, which

had a slightly larger geographic area and slightly smaller population than Italy, was

at least 9.6 per 1,000 in the peak years of the 1920s. Hebei and Shandong provinces

(sources of migration to Manchuria) had an even higher rate of 10 per 1,000 during

that same decade. The small islands of the Caribbean and South Paciﬁc probably

had some of the highest emigration rates in the world. In terms of broader regional

population, emigration from Europe from 1846 to 1940 amounted to 15.4 percent of the

European population in 1900, compared to 11.3 percent in China and 10.4 percent in

South Asia. The slightly larger magnitude of European emigration is not insigniﬁcant

(and only tentative, given our lack of knowledge about internal and overland migration)

but is not so large as to justify a categorical distinction between quantity and quality

of migration in the different regions.

Most textbooks and scholarly articles assume that the mass migrations were only

a transatlantic phenomena. They are often treated as emblematic of the modernity,

entrepreneurial spirit, and dislocations of the modernizing West. If Asian migrations

are remembered at all, it is usually only the relatively small number of migrants that

were indentured to Europeans. They are often described as bound by tradition,

impoverished, and unwilling or unable to migrate except under direct compulsion

to Europeans. How can the numbers presented here help us to rethink the scale of

migration in world history, the meaning and signiﬁcance of the Atlantic migrations,

the relationship of migration to a changing global economy, and the regional variations

and connections within that economy? The following charts can help students answer

these questions.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Global Migration Over Time

FIGURE 1. GLOBAL MIGRATION 1846–1940

Source: McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846-1940” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 165.

FIGURE 2: REGIONAL TRENDS IN GLOBAL MIGRATION, 1846–1940 (FIVE YEAR AVERAGES)

Figure 2: Regional Trends in Global Migration, 1846-1940 (Five Year Averages)

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

1846-50 1851-55 1856-60 1861-65 1866-70 1871-75 1876-80 1881-85 1886-90 1891-95 1896-

1900

1901-05 1906-10 1911-15 1916-20 1920-25 1926-30 1931-35 1936-40

Source: McKeown, "Global Migration," 165.

Thousands

North Asia

Southeast Asia

Trans-Atlantic

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

Figure 1 shows the combined development of the three main overseas ﬂows over time,

and Figure 2 shows their separate trajectories. Figure 2, in particular, can be used to

raise questions that can draw out some of the similarities and differences between

the main migration systems, and the ways in which migration ﬂows are shaped

by historical events. For example, what are some of the major events that seem to

have impacted all of the ﬂows, such as the global depression from the 1870s to early

1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression of the 1930s? At what points do the

systems seem to be developing differently? What might be the causes of differences?

Overall, do the three ﬂows seem more similar of different in their development? Does

1914 seem like an appropriate date to mark the end of the age of mass migrations,

as is often the case in histories of the Atlantic migrations? To what extent should

these three systems be understood as interlinked and embedded in common global

conditions, and to what extent should they be understood as unique to regional

contexts?

These charts also offer an opportunity to discuss the general causes of migration

in the context of a broader knowledge of world history. Overall, global migration

increased more quickly than world population. It amounted to 0.36 percent of the

world’s population in the 1850s, rising to 0.96 percent in the 1880s, 1.67 percent in

the 1900s, and then declining to 1.58 percent in the 1920s. Why did long-distance

migration become an increasingly signiﬁcant aspect of world history? Any answer

must draw on a broad knowledge of the many direct and indirect effects of

industrialization and expanding global markets: improved transportation technologies;

the need for laborers in factories and rapidly growing cities; the need for workers to

produce raw materials in plantations and mines around the world to supply those

factories; the mobility of people to collect, distribute, and sell the raw materials and

ﬁnished products; a rapidly expanding world population pushing out to frontiers; the

settlement of new lands and frontiers to produce food to feed workers in cities, mines,

and plantations; and the attraction of these frontiers as places of abundant land and

high wages due to relatively low populations.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Global Migration and the Distribution of World Population

FIGURE 3: DISTRIBUTION OF WORLD POPULATION, 1800–2006

TABLE 2: WORLD POPULATION GROWTH BY REGIONS, 1850–1950 (MILLIONS)

1850

Population

1950

Population

Average

Annual

Growth

Receiving

Americas

59 325 1.72%

North Asia

22 104 1.57%

SE Asia

42 177 1.45%

Sending

Europe

265 515 0.67%

South Asia

230 445 0.66%

China

420 520 0. 21%

Africa

81 205 0.93%

World

1200 2500 0.74%

Source: Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (London: Penguin, 1978).

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

Figure 3 and Table 2 show the relative growth of populations in the main migrant

sending and receiving regions from 1800 to 1950. Mass migration contributed to

a signiﬁcant redistribution of world population into three underpopulated frontier

regions from 1800 to 1950. The table demonstrates these shifts in absolute terms,

showing that population growth in the destination regions was more than twice that

of world population as a whole, and growth in the sending regions was less than that

of world population. Taken together, the three main destination regions accounted for

10 percent of the world’s population in 1850 and 24 percent in 1950. The chart offers

a more visual representation of the shifts in proportions over time. Students must

learn to use the legend to help distinguish between the main sending and receiving

regions.

This chart can also be a starting point for a comparison with the more recent

wave of mass international migration since the 1960s. In contrast to earlier frontier

destinations, the bulk of contemporary migration has moved from the poor countries

to wealthy and well-established countries in North America, Western Europe, the

oil-rich Gulf states and Israel, and a scattering of other relatively wealthy countries

such as Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan,

and Malaysia. This is also a movement from places with the most rapidly growing

populations to places with stagnant or shrinking populations. Why might these shifts

in migration patterns have taken place? Are these shifts reﬂected in the population

distribution for 2006? How might the contemporary world population distribution look

without this migration?

A focus on the present can also raise the questions of the overall effects of

historical migrations. The descendants of European migrants are much more

prominent around the world than the descendants of Asian migrants. Indeed, the

population of Canada alone is larger than the entire population of overseas Chinese

around the world. If the original migration ﬂows were similar in size, why this great

discrepancy in the number of descendants? A discussion of these differences could

center on the idea that most European migrants moved to temperate areas where

native populations quickly died or were killed off. In contrast, many Asian migrants

moved to tropical areas with well-established native populations. We often do not

count their contemporary descendants as Indian or Chinese because they have

become Burmese, Filipinos, Thais, Vietnamese, or other local peoples. Also, tropical

areas were much less amenable to the establishment of families. How many tropical

regions have large white populations? Manchuria also offers a counterexample of an

Asian migration to a temperate zone that came to dominate a region at the expense of

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

a local population in a way that was similar to the destinations of European migration.

These answers also point to the role of power in shaping the legacy of migration. Laws

excluding migrants from white settler nations in temperate zones and the ability of

Europeans to overwhelm native peoples rather then live together with them played

important roles in the long-term effects of migration.

Convergence of Migration Patterns

FIGURE 4. RETURN MIGRANTS AS PROPORTION OF EMIGRANTS, 1870–1937

Figure 4: Return Migrants as Proportion of Emigrants, 1870-1937

100

120

140

160

180

200

1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935

Sources: Carter, et al, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1:547-8; Davis, Population of India,

100; McKeown, "Global Migrations," 186-9.

Percentage

Returning to Europe from US

Returning to China from Abroad

Returning to India from Abroad

Sources: Carter, et al. Historical Statistics of the United States 1:547-8: Davis, Population of India, 100; McKeown,

“Global Migrations,” 186-9.

Figure 4 shows the rates of return migration in proportion to emigration of three major

migration ﬂows from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s. Short-term shifts

in the rate of return migration are generally a good way to measure the effects of

business and unemployment cycles. Economic depression and decreased employment

opportunities abroad correspond with higher return rates because fewer people are

enticed to move abroad and more people choose to return home. This chart shows

that return rates of three separate ﬂows converged by the early twentieth century, not

only in the timing of the cycles but also in the absolute rates. What does this suggest

about the growth and integration of the world economy? Can we talk of an early era of

economic globalization?

Understanding Global Migration Through Charts

This chart can also be used with case studies as part of a discussion about the

nature and organization of migration. Why do so many people return? Do these return

rates ﬁt with popular understandings of migration as the relocation and permanent

settlement of individuals and families in search of a new life? What might be other

ways of understanding migration, such as travel for temporary labor, earning money

to support or establish a household back home, or as chain migration in which

individuals gradually followed family members over a period of years and even

generations as the earlier migrants established themselves?

Segregation of World Migration Systems

FIGURE 5: CHINESE MIGRATION, 1850–1940

Sources: See McKeown, “Global Migrations,” 188-9.

FIGURE 6: INDIAN MIGRATION, 1842–1937

Sources: Davis, Population of India, 100; with modiﬁcation based on Heidmann, Kamgonies in Sri Lanka, 99-110.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

We have divided global overseas migration into three systems. But we should not take

these systems for granted. Figures 5 and 6 examine changes in the relative ﬂows of

migration from South China and India to destinations within and outside of Southeast

Asia. Both of these charts show that from the 1850s to 1870s, large proportions of

Asian migrants traveled to the Americas and Australia, very often under their own

ﬁnances and organization (although on European shipping). In other words, patterns

of global migration had the potential to become much more globally integrated across

the boundaries of these three systems. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century,

as Asian migration grew manyfold, the amounts beyond Asia did not grow at all

and the three separate systems increasingly became a reality. This segregation of

migration patterns happened even as the economic context of migration converged,

as shown in Figure 4.

These simultaneous trends of convergence and divergence can lead to broader

questions about the signiﬁcance of regions in world history. To what extent should

regions be understood as the effects of distinct cultures and systems that existed long

before the nineteenth century or as the product of speciﬁc historical changes over the

course of the nineteenth century? An answer to this question would include informed

speculation on the causes of this regionalization. Is there evidence that preexisting

differences in wealth, culture, population, state control of migration, or technology

shaped migration into these different systems? Or should we look to the effects of

empire, discriminatory laws, racism, and ideologies that insisted Westerners and

Easterners were fundamentally different?

Some counterfactuals might help develop different perspectives on these

questions. What would the world look like now if the pre-1880s migration trends

had continued? What would the world look like if Asians and Africans truly did not

migrate in great numbers, as is assumed in many texts? In short, we should not take

the distribution of wealth and population in the world for granted but as the product of

speciﬁc global historical processes.

American Immigration in a

Transnational Perspective

Robert Zeidel

University of Wisconsin-Stout

Menomonie, Wisconsin

Synopsis

Migration is, and long has been, a global phenomenon. Since prehistoric times,

various forces have pushed and pulled human beings to move to new locations, a

process that has resulted in the peopling of all land areas except for the frozen regions

of Antarctica. With the advent of the nation state, immigration has come to mean

travel that crosses an international border or frontier, and that is made with the intent

of establishing some degree of permanence, as opposed to mere visitation.

The United States offers a microstudy of immigration during the last 500 years.

Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, myriad ethnic festivals, and even the proposed

border wall between the United States and Mexico bear witness to the extent to

which the United States has been, and continues to be, a nation of immigrants.

Exploring various sources gives students an opportunity to understand where

migrants originated, compare the differences in arrivals at major immigration ports,

and to understand the problems immigrants encountered upon arrival, especially

the negative reactions of established Americans, often called “natives.” What has

happened in the United States, then, can help students to understand immigration in

a global, or transnational, context.

Materials and Time

This lesson is designed for one to two class periods. Teachers and students will need

access to the World Wide Web, and, depending on the teacher’s desire to present

images to the class, a means to digitally project Web images. Other primary sources

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

are available in most government depositories, often located at college or university

libraries.

• EllisIsland:www.ellisisland.org/

• AngelIsland:www.angelisland.org/immigr02.html

• JacobRiis,How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New

York, with Illustrations Chieﬂy Taken from Photographs by the Author (New

York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). Found at: www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/

inforev/riis/title.html (accessed January 24, 2008).

• LibraryofCongress,AmericanMemoryCollection:http://memory.loc.gov/

ammem/index.html

• HomesteadandPullmanStrikes:http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/strikes.html

• HenryCabotLodge,“SpeechtotheU.S.Senate,”Congressional Record,

54th Congress, 1st session, 16 March 1896, 28: 2817-20.

• UnitedStatesImmigrationCommission(DillinghamCommission),

Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, with Conclusions

and Recommendations of the Minority, volume 1 (Washington: Government

Printing Ofﬁce, 1911).

• PresidentWoodrowWilson’sVetoofthe1915LiteracyTest,Congressional

Record, 63rd Congress, 3rd session, 28 January 1915, 52: 2481-83.

Objectives

Students will learn how global migration has helped to shape the United States’

national identity, making it a nation of immigrants, and how “natives” have responded

to the newcomers.

Discussion Points

This lesson plan seeks to place U.S. immigration in a transnational context. Teachers

will be able to discuss:

1. Push and pull factors that have attracted succeeding “waves” of

immigrants.

2. Anti-immigrant reactions to “new arrivals” on the part of those with more

longstanding residence or native ancestry.

3. Imposition of immigration restrictions.

American Immigration in a Transnational Perspective

Although American immigration dates from the colonial era to the present (teachers

may wish to review this information as an introduction), this lesson focuses on

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the United States both

experienced a period of considerable immigration and exhibited a notable anti-

immigrant movement.

Lesson 1

Mass Immigration During America’s Gilded Age and Progressive Era,

1865–1929

Students should understand how the expanding American economy, characterized

by the rise of big business, attracted immigrants from Europe, Asia, and the Western

Hemisphere. One valuable Web site is that of students and historians at Vassar

College. The site, “1896”, contains valuable social, political, and cultural information

from the era. (See http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html. An essay, “Robber

Barons,” authored by J. Bradford DeLong, provides teachers with a valuable critique

of the industrialists of the period. That essay is found at: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/

Econ_Articles/carnegie/DeLong_Moscow_paper2.html.

The Library of Congress Web site, “American Memory,” provides an excellent

photo archive, with several images of industrialization in Gilded Age America,

along with other teacher resources. The “Homestead and Pullman Strikes” Web site,

written by Spence Holman at Vassar College, contains both images and text from

that era. The latter site is especially good for showing the era’s contentious and often

confrontational nature. Both sites, but especially that of the Library of Congress, show

ethnically oriented materials.

a. An expanding U.S. economy attracted millions of immigrants from all parts

of the world, and most immigrants came to the United States for economic

reasons.

b. The nation’s population became much more diverse. The Ellis Island Web

site provides an excellent summary of this change over time.

c. Immigrants tended to settle in ethnic enclaves, the so-called little

communities. These were areas of larger cities, most notably New York City,

where a particular ethnic group dominated. “How the Other Half Lives,”

on the Jacob Riis Web site, provides a contemporary, albeit unﬂattering,

description and discussion of these enclaves. Chinatown, in San Francisco,

is another excellent example. In addition, Congress refused to modify a

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

1790 law that limited naturalization to whites, thereby excluding those

Chinese who could enter the United States legally for obtaining citizenship.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, however, children

of Chinese who were born in the United States did receive birthright

citizenship.

d. Americans increasingly associated immigrants with socioeconomic

problems, engendering negative images of the newcomers, as a problematic

“other half.”

e. Immigration during this time resulted in the imposition of restrictions (see

below for more information on this).

Student Activities

1. Use the Ellis Island Web site (which covers all aspects of immigration, not

just those immigrants from Europe who passed through the station) to have

students ﬁnd evidence of growing ethnic pluralism in the United States.

The “Peopling of America” section provides a time line and in-depth history

of all periods of immigration, including 1865–1929.

• Havethestudentsexaminetheimagestodiscernchangesovertime.

What do the images suggest about how the nationality or ethnicity of

immigrants changed around the turn of the century?

• Havethestudentsmakeconclusionsaboutthenatureofexclusion

policies by making time-line connections. By putting a time line of

ethnic groups’ arrivals, key socioeconomic events (such as strikes or

President William McKinley’s assassination), and the imposition of

restrictions, students can be asked to discuss the cause-and-effect

relationships.

• Havestudentsdoasearchfortheirownimmigrantancestors,andreport

their ﬁndings to the class.

2. Use the Angel Island Web site to compare the entry experiences of

Europeans through Ellis Island with those of Chinese immigrants through

Angel Island. Have the students study the photographs and compare their

conclusions about the subjects with those at Ellis Island. Discuss the extent

to which race has been a factor in the exclusion of certain immigrants.

American Immigration in a Transnational Perspective

3. Use the Web site devoted to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives to have

students discuss how the host society develops negative images and

impressions of immigrants. Ask the students how Jacob Riis’s text and

images give impressions different from those on the Ellis Island site.

Lesson 2

Immigration Restriction

Although the United States often touts itself as a “nation of immigrants,” it also has

been a nation that has sought to exclude foreigners, either from entry into the country

or from full participation in its institutions.

a. Beginning in 1790 through the 1950s, the United States limited

naturalization to whites.

b. Since 1875, the United States has excluded various peoples based on race,

perceived harmful characteristics or qualities (such as criminal activity),

concerns about sheer numbers, and concerns about their deleterious effects

on the native population.

c. America continues to receive more immigrants than it wants, at least as

measured by the fact that many of those now entering the United States

must do so by extralegal methods; these so-called illegal aliens remain a

controversial topic, with many Americans wanting the government to do

more to stem the ﬂow.

Time Line of Implementation of Immigration Restriction, 1882–1921

• 1882—ChineseExclusionAct.ThisactexcludedmostChineselaborers

from the United States for a period of 10 years. It was renewed in 1892 and

was made permanent in 1902. The act exempted merchants (considered to

be Chinese migrants of a “better class”) from restriction to make it appear

that the United States wanted only to exclude “undesirable” coolies (notably

the railroad workers). This measure, though, effectively curtailed Chinese

immigration, laying the foundation for other exclusion acts.

• 1885—ExclusionofContractLaborers.Thisprohibitedtheimmigration

of those brought to the United States under contract from an American

business.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

• 1891—Exclusionof“LikelytoBecomeaPublicCharge.”Thisact,which

came closest to general exclusion until the passage of the 1917 Literacy Test

Act, prohibited those deemed incapable of supporting themselves in the

United States. The act also excluded the mentally and physically inﬁrm, and

those of questionable character, such as criminals.

• 1903—AnarchistExclusionAct.FollowingtheassassinationofPresident

William McKinley, Congress acted to exclude anarchists, establishing a

precedent for the exclusion and deportation of alien adherents to so-called

radical doctrines.

• 1907–1910—DillinghamCommission.Thiscommissionstudiedall

aspects of American immigration with the aim of making enlightened

recommendations as to future immigration policies, speciﬁcally those

dealing with restriction. The commission endorsed the propriety of future

restrictions based on economic considerations. Also, the commission

identiﬁed a literacy requirement as the most feasible means of restriction

and made reference to the possible use of nationality-based quotas.

• 1917—LiteracyTestAct.Thisactexcludedalladultimmigrantswhocould

not read or write some language. This act was passed over President

Woodrow Wilson’s veto.

• 1921—QuotaAct.Thissetlimitsonthenumberofeachnationalitywho

could enter the United States in any given year. The Bureau of Immigration

computed the quotas based on the number of each nationality identiﬁed in

the 1910 census. Originally temporary, this act was renewed annually until

1924.

• 1924—Congressrevisedthequotasbyloweringallowablenumbers,and

made them permanent. Quotas were established by using the 1890 Census

as the basis for computation. This methodology discriminated against

southern and eastern Europeans. Further, no quotas were allotted to Asians.

Quotas, however, did not apply to Western Hemisphere immigrants.

Student Activities

1. Review Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1896 Senate speech (considered by

contemporaries to be a classic enunciation of the restrictionist argument)

and discuss why he believed that the United States should restrict

immigration.

American Immigration in a Transnational Perspective

2. Review President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the 1915 literacy test bill (which

Congress did not override) and discuss his motives for his rejection of the

calls for restriction.

3. Review the Dillingham Commission’s reports and discuss both their positive

evaluation of American immigrants and the logic behind their limited

endorsements of restriction.

4. Ask students to discuss if the United States should have implemented more

restrictive immigration policies in the early twentieth century, and if so,

what justiﬁed that decision.

5. Possible starting points for document-based questions:

a. Focusing on this era, teachers can prompt their students to consider

why Americans of this era began to divide immigrants into “old” and

“new” categories. Reasons would include the arrival of nationalities

that previously had not arrived in large numbers and whose members

exhibited cultural characteristics different from those of previously

dominant groups. A study question can ask students if the designations

had validity, or were simply a means of expressing negativity toward

certain ethnic groups.

b. Use the Riis and Homestead/Pullman sites to have students move

into a historiographical debate on the best interpretation of America’s

growing negativity toward immigrants and the subsequent calls for

restriction: Is it best understood as the product of “nativism,” deﬁned as

based on ethnic or cultural reasons, or should the reaction be explained

as a product of the immigrants’ association with many of the era’s

problematic aspects? Teachers could draw primary sources from the

Jacob Riis and the Homestead and Pullman Strikes Web sites to provide

prompts for students to write a DBQ essay on negativity focused on

immigrants to the United States in the Gilded Age.

c. Using various document readers and Web sites, have students ﬁnd

primary source documents suitable for the construction of a DBQ that

explores the lives of immigrants before they left their home country,

reasons for leaving their home country, and destination-country attitudes

regarding the arrival of the immigrants. Using AP World History

guidelines, students should also construct the grading rubric. Students

then should write the essay.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

6. A ﬁnal, albeit challenging, idea for student research is to ask students to

examine U.S. foreign policy as it relates to countries whose immigrants

were being excluded in this period. What does that research tell students

about the relationship between foreign policy and migration? A good source

for this topic (as well as a general introduction to the global aspect of

American immigration) is Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Barbarian Virtues: The

United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917

(Jacobson 2000).

Bibliography

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in

American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gates: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the

Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

_____. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and

Abroad, 1876–1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Preston, William Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Zeidel, Robert F. Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham

Commission, 1900–1927. DeKalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam—

Involuntary Relocation of Native Americans:

A Lesson on Forced Migration

Valerie Cox

Appleton West High School

Appleton, Wisconsin

Synopsis

After analyzing the concepts of manifest destiny and entitlement, several case

studies involving the forced migration of Native Americans will be analyzed utilizing

information presented by the teacher and primary source documents. The case

studies are of the Oneida in the Northeast, the Cherokee in the Southeast, the Nez

Perce in the Northwest, and the Navajo in the Southwest. The focus of the lesson is

the U.S. government’s justiﬁcation of removal—usually with brutal military force—to

lands deemed to have no value and the subsequent creation of reservations to contain

Native Americans to the designated areas for ongoing control of non-European

cultures. Lesson extensions include related issues such as Oklahoma statehood,

Japanese American internment camps during World War II, and eminent domain in

today’s communities throughout the United States.

Time Required

Although a condensed version of the lesson could be taught in a single 45-minute

class period, a full analysis of the topic and application of the lesson would typically

take two or three 45-minute class periods.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Materials Required

• Copiesofthefollowingteacherbackgroundinformationnotes:

• ManifestDestiny(AppendixesAandB)

• CaseStudy#1:Oneida(AppendixesCandD)

• CaseStudy#2:Cherokee(AppendixesEandF)

• CaseStudy#3:NezPerce(AppendixesGandH)

• CaseStudy#4:Navajo(AppendixesIandJ)

• Copiesofthefollowingprimarysourcedocuments(seeAppendixes):

• Document#1:ManifestDestiny—CoiningthePhrase

• Document#2:ManifestDestiny—CriticalOppositionPopularizesthe

Phrase

• Document#3:Oneida—U.S.DepartmentofStateExplanationofIndian

Removal

• Document#4:Cherokee—AMissionary’sDescription

• Document#5:Cherokee—ATraveler’sDescription

• Document#6:NezPerce—ChiefJoseph’sSelectedSpeeches

• Document#7:Navajo—GeneralCarleton’sGeneralOrderNo.15

• Document#8:Navajo—ReportfromCaptainJosephBerney

• Document#9:Navajo—ReportfromCaptainFrancisMcCabe

• WallmaporprojectionoftheUnitedStates

Goals/Objectives

• Studentswilllearnabouttheconceptofmanifestdestinyasitappliesto

U.S. history.

• StudentswilllearnabouttheforcedmigrationsofNativeAmericansunder

the U.S. federal government’s laws and practices.

• Studentswillbeabletoapplytheinformationregardingforcedmigrationto

other incidences in U.S. history as well as current situations.

Access Prior Knowledge

Determine if your students have any previous experience with or knowledge of

eviction or forced removal by asking, “Have any of you heard of a situation where

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam—

a person or family was forced to leave his or her home permanently?” Separate

the responses into situations where the eviction was due to a failure to fulﬁll

responsibilities (e.g., paying rent, 18-year-olds not abiding by parental rules) and where

the eviction was due to someone wanting to assume another’s property rights (e.g.,

urban renewal, eminent domain, condo conversion of an apartment). Focus the class’s

attention on situations where the person/family evicted was fulﬁlling responsibilities

but someone with more power wanted the person’s/family’s property rights. That’s

what this lesson is about.

Since some of your students may have had a U.S. history course previously,

assess student familiarity with the concept of manifest destiny. This might be

accomplished by simply asking your students what they know or having them write

what they know. Look for some understanding that the concept refers to a belief in the

right (God-given or basic entitlement) of white Americans to spread the United States

across the entire North American continent.

New Information

1. Manifest Destiny

If you determine that your students already have a basic understanding of

the concept of manifest destiny from a prior course, then proceed with an

examination of the primary source documents. If you determine that your

students lack a basic understanding of the concept of manifest destiny, then

provide a brief explanation of the concept and its application in the 1840s to

1880s in the American West.

Distribute the primary source documents that contain the excerpt from John

O’Sullivan’s 1845 essay in the Democratic Review in which he coins the

phrase “manifest destiny” as well as the speech by Representative Winthrop

that ridiculed the concept of manifest destiny (see Appendix B for source).

Use a map of the United States to show where the current frontier border

was at that time, as well as Texas, Oregon Territory, and Mexico’s territory

of California and the Southwest. Ask students:

• WhatdoesJohnO’Sullivan’sconceptmean,andwhatramicationsdid

it have for people in North America?

• WhatdoyouthinkofRepresentativeWinthrop’sresponsetoO’Sullivan?

• Hasthisconcept,evenifnotcalledbythesamename,beenpresentin

other cultures and time periods that we have studied this year?

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Provide background information from Teacher Notes (see Appendix A) about

John O’Sullivan’s intentions, his reliance on a “higher law,” and his positions on

the expansions of the day—Texas, Oregon, California, and the Mexican War. Ask

students:

• CanyouthinkofanyotherexamplesfromU.S.historyorcurrentevents

where the concept of manifest destiny seems to apply?

Case Study #1

The Relocation of the Oneida Tribe from Upstate New York to

Wisconsin

Provide students with background information about the Iroquois Confederacy. If you

know your students have had a U.S. history course that covered the confederacy, ask

the students, “Can anyone tell me about the Iroquois Confederacy?” Students should

understand that ﬁve tribes—Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga—

formed an alliance for peace, complete with a constitution, in upstate New York,

and parts of Pennsylvania, Québec, and Ontario before any contact with Europeans.

The Iroquois joined with the British in colonial times to defeat the French and their

native allies, the Huron and the Algonquin tribes. (In 1720 the Iroquois Confederacy

expanded to six tribes with the admission of the Tuscarora.) This is background for

students to understand that the Oneida tribe was part of this famous confederacy,

which supported Great Britain against the French. Show the lands of the Iroquois

Confederacy on a map of the United States.

Using the Teacher Notes (see Appendix C), present to students the story of the

Oneida tribe. Emphasize that the tribe separated from their Iroquois Confederacy

members by supporting the American colonists against the British in the

Revolutionary War, but that action caused retaliation and the white man’s resentment

against the entire Iroquois Confederacy. This resulted in the reduction of Oneida

lands from 6 million acres to 32 acres by the early 1800s despite federal treaties that

supposedly protected the Oneida for their assistance in the Revolutionary War. Show

on a map the distance involved in the early nineteenth century of moving from New

York to Wisconsin.

Distribute the primary source document from the U.S. Department of State in

which the ofﬁcial federal government’s explanation of the events of the nineteenth

century regarding Indian removal is provided through a modern perspective. Ask

students:

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam

• DidAmericansintentionallytakeadvantageoftheIndiansanduse

different cultural perspectives to trick the Indians?

• WhatdoweunderstandnowaboutIndianculturethatwedidn’t

understand, or want to understand, in the nineteenth century?

• Whatdoyouthinkwemaynotunderstandabouteventsintoday’sworld

that persons living in the nineteenth century may have had a better

understanding of from their retrospective viewpoint?

• YoumayalsoobtainonlineboththeTreatyofFortStanwixandthe

Canandaigua Treaty. Analyze the documents for guarantees to the

Oneida tribe regarding the federal government’s protection of their lands

in upstate New York. Ask students:

• Howisatreatylikeacontract?

• Wouldyoufeelsafeifyousignedsuchatreaty?

• Howwouldyoufeelifyourlandwasthentakenbywhitegovernment

ofﬁcials who said they were from the state of New York?

• IfyouwereanOneidaIndian,whatwouldyoutellyourchildrenand

grandchildren about what happened to you and your tribe?

Case Study #2

The Relocation of the Cherokee Tribe from Georgia to Oklahoma

Explain to students the origins of Oklahoma’s nickname, “the Sooner

State.” The following main points should emerge: Oklahoma was set aside

by the U.S. government as the destination for relocated Indian tribes

because the land was thought to be worthless. When more land was

needed for white settlers, the U.S. government changed the laws protecting

Indian reservations with the Dawes Act and opened Oklahoma to settlers

beginning in 1889; settlers who illegally entered Oklahoma areas to stake

land claims before the ofﬁcial time were called “Sooners” from the Indian

Appropriation Act of 1889, which prohibited people from entering the area

too soon. But by 1908 the University of Oklahoma had selected “Sooners”

as its nickname, which turned an illegal action into a source of pride that

continues to this day.

Using the Teacher Notes (see Appendix E), present to students the story of the

Cherokee tribe of Georgia and the infamous Trail of Tears, which was a result of

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the military’s use of

brutal force, which caused the death of 4,000 peaceful Indians whose land was taken

by trickery. Use a map of the United States to show the relocation from northern

Georgia to Oklahoma.

Distribute the primary source documents (see Appendix F)—an excerpt from

Andrew Jackson’s Seventh Annual Message to Congress of 1835, the missionary’s

account of 1838, and the traveler’s account of 1839. Ask students:

• WhatjusticationdidPresidentJacksongivetoforciblyrelocatethe

Cherokee tribe?

• Howmuchpowershouldgovernmentshaveinconscatingpossessions

and relocating peaceful citizens?

• WhywasthetreatmentoftheCherokeeconsideredappropriateand

acceptable?

• IfyouwereaCherokee,whatwouldyoutellyourchildrenand

grandchildren about white Americans, government promises, and the

founding principles of the United States?

Case Study #3

The Relocation of the Nez Perce Tribe from Idaho to Oklahoma

Certainly an important part of achieving manifest destiny was government

seizure of land. Teachers may want to do some searching for other examples,

such as the seizure of land from Australia’s Aborigines, or seizures from

indigenous Americans in Central and South America by the Spanish. Begin by

asking students, “Should the U.S. government allow law-abiding residents to

leave the country to live someplace else if that is their preference?” Have them

explain their stance. This opinion question should set into motion a primary

question surrounding the ﬂight on which Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce tribe

toward freedom in Canada rather than a reservation in the United States after

previous reservation treaties had been broken by the U.S. government.

Using the Teacher Notes (see Appendix G), present the story of Chief Joseph of

the Nez Perce tribe. This story captured the attention of the nation in the summer

of 1877 as Chief Joseph tried to lead his tribe of 800 Indians to the Canadian

border ahead of the 2,000 soldiers who were trying to capture the Nez Perce band

in order to send them to a reservation rather than allow them to leave the country

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam

to live in Canada. As the teacher tells the story, show the map of the approximate

escape route of the Nez Perce through Idaho and Montana.

Distribute the three primary source documents of Chief Joseph’s speeches

(see Appendix H). Ask students:

• WhatdoesChiefJosephwant?

• WhatdoesChiefJosephsayhashappened?

• HowdoyouthinktheU.S.governmentshouldhaverespondedtoChief

Joseph on these various occasions?

Case Study #4

The Relocation of the Navajo Tribe from Arizona to New Mexico

Kit Carson is a ﬁgure central to the story of the relocation of the Navajo. Students

may know some things about him; ask them what they know. Students may

know about the legendary Kit Carson who was a mountain man, an Indian scout,

and a soldier with John Fremont in California. Typically, student accounts of Kit

Carson will be romanticized versions of an American frontiersman. This case

study provides a counterview of Kit Carson because of his role in the capture and

deaths of many Navajo and Apaches seeking peaceful coexistence with white

settlers in 1863-64—the incident known as “the Long Walk.”

Using the Teacher Notes (see Appendix I), present the story of the Long Walk

of the Navajo tribe. This story is often overlooked because it took place during

the Civil War and was so offensive to U.S. government ofﬁcials when they

investigated it in the years immediately following the Civil War that the Navajo

tribe was allowed to return to their native lands—instead of being relocated to

a distant reservation—as an apology for their mistreatment. As the teacher tells

the story, show the map of the Long Walk.

Distribute the primary source documents (see Appendix J) from accounts of the

Long Walk. Ask students:

• WhatroledidKitCarsonplayintheremovaloftheNavajo?

• WhydoyouthinkhehasbeenromanticizedinstoriesoftheWestern

frontier?

• WhydoyouthinktheNavajoIndiansweretreatedthisway?

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

• Whenisthegovernmentjustiedinrelocatingpeople?

Does might make right?”

Application of New Knowledge

Assign students a graphic organizer to compare and contrast the four case studies.

Categories should include the tribe, location, dates, key people, background, key

events, ﬁnal disposition, government justiﬁcation for removal, and the student’s

personal viewpoint of the removal. Teachers may want to include other categories.

Then ask students to brainstorm other involuntary relocations that they have

heard of where families or groups were forced to move from their property. Analyze

the list for common reasons, common responses, common governmental actions, and

public reactions. Compare these results to the four case studies of American Indians.

As a wrap-up activity, assign students the task of writing a newspaper editorial

regarding one of the case studies as if they were alive at the time. This persuasive

essay should present the facts, the relevant laws and legal obligations, and the

government’s responsibility as the student sees it. After submission to the teacher,

sort the editorials according to case study and post them in the four corners of the

classroom. Arrange students in groups to rotate to the four corners to read the various

perspectives. Note similarities and differences in a follow-up discussion.

Generalizations

Ask students the following closure questions related to the lesson’s goals:

• “Whatisyouropinionoftheconceptofmanifest destiny? Has it changed

since we began this lesson? If so, how and why did it change? How does

this concept and your perspective relate to today’s society?”

• “WhatfactstandsoutfromthisstudyofforcedmigrationsofNative

Americans in U.S. history? Why does that fact stand out for you?”

• “Doyouhaveanyinsightsoropinionsthathavechangedasaresultof

this lesson? What is the change and why did you change your thinking or

perspective?”

• “Whatdoyoufeelistheenduringlessontobelearnedfromthesecase

studies? How will you apply it to current and future situations?”

• “Whatwouldyouliketoknowthatwasn’tcoveredoransweredinour

lesson?”

An Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam

Lesson Extensions

1. Study the history of Oklahoma from a land set aside for Indian reservations

to a state mostly owned and occupied by white settlers. How were treaties

honored or broken in the process?

2. Examine the creation of Japanese American internment camps during

World War II. How were these forced relocations of families, even American

citizens, carried out by the U.S. government? What was the impact on the

families involved?

3. Study the issue of eminent domain through the twentieth century. Focus

on one community’s story of urban renewal, decisions for road placements,

relocation of families, or government assumption of land for public good.

Study the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows government the use

of eminent domain, and conﬁscation of property and relocation of people, for

private development that will make better use of the land than its current

use.

4. Using information from this lesson and the lesson that follows, “British

Convict Forced Migration to Australia” by Kathy Callahan, ask students to

compare and contrast government motivations for both forced migration

events.

5. A lesson extension for later in the semester: Compare and contrast the

“Long Walk” of the Navajo tribe (1863-64) with that of the “Long March” of

the Communists in China (1934-35).

6. Other possible topics for the study of forced migration that might be used

with this lesson study include:

• Tibetanmigrationfollowingtheinvasion(andsubsequentabsorption)by

the Chinese into Tibet in the 1950s.

• PalestinianmigrationfollowingthecreationofIsrael.

• Recentgovernment-forcedmigrationinChinaenablingtheconstruction

of Three Gorges Dam and facilities for the 2008 Olympics.

Appendix A

Manifest Destiny Teacher Notes

Many of the white settlers of the United States since the Mayﬂower landed in 1620

have believed in America’s preordained right to grow unimpeded into a shining

example of a new type of country for the rest of the world to admire and emulate. This

right was thought to be bestowed on Americans by divine providence and included

the white man’s right to occupy all land in North America.

However, it wasn’t until 1845 that the phrase manifest destiny was actually

coined by journalist John L. O’Sullivan. At that time O’Sullivan was inﬂuential in the

Democratic Party and was advocating for the United States to annex the independent

Republic of Texas and to begin planning for the desired annexation of California and

the Oregon Territory. In the July–August 1845 issue of Democratic Review magazine,

O’Sullivan wrote an essay entitled “Annexation” in which he summed up hundreds

of years of American beliefs in the phrase manifest destiny for the ﬁrst time (see

Appendix B for source).

Although the phrase had seen its ﬁrst usage, it didn’t attract attention and

become a national mantra until after its second usage. That was in the December

27, 1845, issue of O’Sullivan’s own newspaper, the New York Morning News, when

O’Sullivan wrote that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon

Territory in the boundary dispute with Great Britain because of the United States’

“manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which

Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and

federated self-government” (see Appendix B for source).

Again, it would have gone unnoticed except that the phrase was criticized by

members of the Whig Party who opposed the Polk administration’s favorable positions

toward annexation of western lands. Representative Robert Winthrop, an inﬂuential

Whig from Massachusetts who would later become the U.S. Speaker of the House,

gave an address on the subject of the annexation of the Oregon Territory on the ﬂoor

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3, 1846, in which he ridiculed the

concept of manifest destiny and demanded to see where this right was given to the

United States in the “First Parent’s” (Adam and Eve’s) last will and testament.

The phrase then became a rallying cry for the entire western expansion

movement that swept the nation and provided a rationale for military force against

anyone (e.g., Mexicans or American Indians) who might stand in the way of white

settlers or annexation.

As for O’Sullivan, his career and notoriety quickly reached an end in 1846 when

he was ﬁred from the New York Morning News and sold his Democratic Review

magazine. He died in poverty and obscurity in 1895.

Appendix B

Manifest Destiny: Coining the Phrase

Excerpted from: John L. O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” Democratic Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (July–August 1845)

…Other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves…limiting our greatness

and checking the fulﬁllment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent

allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions…

Texas has been absorbed into the Union in the inevitable fulﬁllment of the

general law which is rolling our population westward.... It was disintegrated from

Mexico in the natural course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its

own part, blameless on ours.... [its] incorporation into the Union was not only

inevitable, but the most natural, right and proper thing in the world.... California

will, probably, next fall away from...Mexico.... Imbecile and distracted, Mexico

never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country.... The Anglo-

Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible

army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it armed with

the plow and the riﬂe, and markings its trail with schools and colleges, courts

and representative halls, mills and meeting houses. A population will soon be

in actual occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream

of dominion... All this without agency of our government, without responsibility

of our people — in the natural ﬂow of events, the spontaneous working of

principles, and the adaptation of the tendencies and wants of the human race to

the elemental circumstances in the midst of which they ﬁnd themselves placed.

Critical Opposition Popularizes the Phrase

Excerpted from: “Arbitration of the Oregon Question,” a speech delivered on the ﬂoor of the U.S. House of Representatives by

Representative Robert Charles Winthrop on January 3, 1846, contained in Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions by

obert Charles Winthrop (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1852).

I suppose the right of a manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in

any nation except the universal Yankee nation. This right of a manifest destiny…

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

reminds me of another source of title which is worthy of being placed beside

it. Spain and Portugal, we all know, in the early part of the 16th century laid

claim to the jurisdiction of the whole northern continent of America. Francis I is

related to have replied to this pretension, that he should like to see the clause in

“Adam’s Will,” in which their exclusive title was found. Now…I look for an early

reproduction of this idea…I…promise to withdraw all my opposition to giving

notice or taking possession, whenever the right of our manifest destiny can be

fortiﬁed by the provisions of our great First Parent’s last will and testament.

22. Some deﬁnitions of terms from the above Manifest Destiny sources: Texas declared itself independent from Mexico

following a rebellion against Mexico in 1836; Texas joined the United States in 1845. The term Anglo-Saxon refers to the

English; this term comes from the overtaking of the island of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the ﬁfth century

and their subsequent imposition of culture upon the conquered peoples. Spain and Portugal both desired territories in the

Americas; their dispute was settled in 1494 through the creation of the Tordesilla Line as part of the Tordesilla Treaty.

Appendix C

Oneida Tribe Removal Teacher Notes

The Oneida tribe was one of the original ﬁve nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,

which occupied upstate New York and parts of Pennsylvania, Québec, and Ontario.

Around 1720 the Tuscarora tribe moved to an area in upstate New York from North

Carolina and its petition to become the sixth nation in the Iroquois Confederacy was

accepted. The six nations were Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, and

Tusca rora.

The Iroquois became allies of the British in colonial times and fought alongside

British and American troops in various military actions against the French and its

Indian allies, the Huron and Algonquin tribes. After the French and Indian War the

Iroquois thought their alliance with the British would protect them when the British

government issued the Proclamation of 1763, which was supposed to restrict white

settlement from Indian lands west of the line along the Appalachian Mountains.

However, the proclamation was mostly ignored and caused greater pressure on Indian

lands and relations with the colonists.

When the American Revolution started, most of the Iroquois immediately

continued their alliance with the British government and sided with it. However, the

Oneida and the Tuscarora sided with the Americans, thus marking the ﬁrst signiﬁcant

split in the Iroquois Confederacy. The Oneida helped the Americans reoccupy Fort

Stanwix and provided the American side with warriors, scouts, and information. In

addition to assisting with the military campaigns in upstate New York, the Oneida

sent 50 men to serve with Washington’s army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78

and stayed to ﬁght with General Lafayette in the spring before returning home. Polly

Cooper, an Oneida woman who accompanied the men to Valley Forge, became a cook

for General Washington during the winter encampment. As gratitude for showing how

to prepare corn in the most effective manner, Cooper was awarded a shawl by Martha

Washington.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Various attacks on Oneida lands were launched by the British and their Iroquois

allies. In 1780 a major Oneida village was destroyed, which caused the Oneida to seek

shelter at Fort Stanwix. Attacks continued and the Oneida lost much of their property,

possessions, and culture in the process. At the end of the war the newly formed

U.S. Congress gave the Oneida their traditional lands and a guarantee of peace and

protection in the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

White settlers did not agree with the treaty, and the state of New York embarked

on a series of questionable practices to take away all but 32 acres of the 6 million

originally granted to the Oneida. Left to fend for themselves in a hostile environment

without understanding the legalities of documents and still trying to resume life with

scattered tribe members who had limited resources due to the war losses, the Oneida

splintered and lost their lands, as well as their livelihoods, possessions, and societal

norms. It wasn’t until 10 years later, in 1794, that the U.S. government provided

restitution to its former allies—a total of $5,000 was made available for destroyed

homes and lost possessions upon presentation of itemized lists.

With increasing pressure for land due to the construction of the Erie Canal, the

Oneida were persuaded to purchase land in Wisconsin in 1821-22 and vacate their

lands in upstate New York in order to reestablish an independent, self-sufﬁcient tribe.

The ﬁve million acres purchased for $5,000 was supposed to be for joint usage by the

Oneida, Winnebago, and Menominee tribes. However, the Oneida were to lose all but

65,000 acres of land when treaties in 1827 and 1838 took away their lands. Only a few

hundred acres remained by 1929.

Appendix D

Oneida Tribe Removal Primary Source

Documents

U.S. Department of State Explanation of Indian Removal

taken from U.S. Department of State Web site found at www.state.

gov/r/pa/ho/time/dwe/16338.htm

The story of westward expansion by European Americans is a basic theme of the

American experience, but it is also a history of Indian removal from their traditional

lands. Indians lost their lands through purchase, war, disease and even extermination,

but many transfers of Indian land were formalized by treaty. The Constitution of 1789

empowered Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the

several States, and with the Indian tribes.” Federal policy regarded each tribe as a

sovereign entity capable of signing binding treaties with the U.S. government. In

the ﬁrst 40 years of the new republic, the United States signed multiple treaties with

Indian tribes, which usually followed a basic pattern: The signatory tribe withdrew

to a prescribed reservation and in return the federal government promised to provide

supplies, food, and often an annuity.

The U.S. government’s inability and unwillingness to abide by its treaty

obligations with Indian tribes was clearly related to an insatiable demand for cheap

land for European settlers. To make matters more difﬁcult, Indians generally had a

different concept of landownership than Europeans, emphasizing land use for hunting,

farming, or dwelling for the tribe, but not recognizing the concept of individual

ownership. Indian society was loose, decentralized, democratic, and nonauthoritarian,

where “chiefs” were often men of respect and informal authority but not designated

by the tribe to make decisions. The result was that treaties were often signed with

Indian leaders who did not have the authority of the tribe. Whether the system of

Indian treaties was ever meant to work is a matter of debate, but in reality, most

Indian treaties were broken.

23. This material is a statement from the current U.S. Department of State rather than a primary source of the period.

24. Treaty of Fort Stanwix 1784 is available online at www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.phy?rec=1420; Canandaigua Treaty of

1794 is available online at at: http://canandaigua-treaty.org/The_Canandaigua_Treaty_of_1794.html.

Appendix E

Cherokee Tribe Relocation Teacher Notes

The Cherokee tribe was one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes living in the

southeastern United States. The “civilized” term distinguished them from other

American Indians because they had assimilated to “white man’s ways” and had good

relations with the white settlers.

From 1814 to 1824 General Andrew Jackson commanded U.S. military forces that

were used to ﬁght Indian tribes in the southeastern United States and pressure tribes

to enter into unfavorable land treaties so that white settlers could move in. In 1830

President Andrew Jackson gladly signed into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830,

which he had supported. The act gave the president the power to negotiate removal

treaties with Indian tribes from lands east of the Mississippi River. Although the

removal was supposed to be peaceful and voluntary, tribes resisted having their lands

conﬁscated and being relocated to western lands. Jackson then resorted to using

military force to round up the Indians and relocate them to their new lands in what is

now the state of Oklahoma.

Meanwhile, the Cherokee had grown weary of encroaching white settlers and

had adopted a written constitution in 1827 that declared themselves the sovereign

Cherokee Nation based on the manner in which the U.S. government had been

recognizing them when entering into treaties. When the state of Georgia refused

to recognize the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty, the Cherokee appealed to the U.S.

Supreme Court. The Court refused to hear the case in 1830 because it did not

recognize the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty. Then gold was found on the Cherokee

lands, and pressure increased from white settlers. When the Georgia legislature

passed a law to extend state law over Indian lands, the Cherokee appealed again to

the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the Indians had self-governing rights given

to them by the federal government that superseded state laws. President Jackson

refused to enforce this Court decision and continued with removal plans.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

In 1835, after much discussion within the 17,000-member Cherokee tribe of the

removal issue, 20 men who were not elected ofﬁcials of the tribe signed a treaty that

ceded all Cherokee territory east of the Mississippi River to the U.S. government in

return for $5 million and new homelands in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Despite

widespread protests, the U.S. Senate conﬁrmed the treaty by one vote and white

settlers began moving in and driving Cherokee families from their homes.

In the spring of 1838, President Van Buren ordered General Winﬁeld Scott to

enforce the 1835 treaty by having military forces move Cherokees into stockades with

only the possessions they could quickly grab and carry, and where inadequate food

and poor sanitary conditions caused considerable hardship.

The thousand-mile forced march to Oklahoma resulted in 4,000 deaths due to

summer drought, a rainy fall, and the severe winter of 1838-39. The death toll would

have been much higher if General Scott hadn’t ﬁnally agreed to allow the Indians to

organize their own march when initial organization by the military was inhumane and

fatal. The route was named “The Trail of Tears” and is now supervised by the National

Parks Service.

The promised $5 million from the federal government was never paid. The leader

of the group who signed the treaty was killed as a traitor by tribal members when

they reached Oklahoma.

Appendix F

Cherokee Tribe Removal Primary

Source Documents

Excerpt from President Andrew Jackson’s Seventh Annual Message to Congress, delivered on December 7, 1835:

All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems

now to be an established fact they can not live in contact with a civilized community

and prosper. Ages of fruitless endeavors have at length brought us to a knowledge

of this principle of intercommunication with them. The past we can not recall, but

the future we can provide for. Independently of the treaty stipulations into which

we have entered with the various tribes for the usufructuary rights they have ceded

to us, no one can doubt the moral duty of the Government of the United States to

protect and if possible to preserve and perpetuate the scattered remnants of this race

which are left within our borders. In the discharge of this duty an extensive region in

the West has been assigned for their permanent residence. It has been divided into

districts and allotted among them…. The plan for their removal and reestablishment

is founded upon the knowledge we have gained of their character and habits,

and has been dictated by a spirit of enlarged liberality. A territory exceeding in

extent that relinquished has been granted to each tribe. Of its climate, fertility, and

capacity to support an Indian population the representations are highly favorable.

A Missionary’s Description of the 1838 Stockades Where

Indians Were Collected

Excerpt from

Baptist Missionary Magazine

18 (Sept. 1838)

The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their houses,

and encamped at the forts and military posts, all over the nation. In Georgia,

especially, multitudes were allowed no time to take any thing with them except

the clothes they had on. Well-furnished houses were left prey to plunderers,

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

who, like hungry wolves, follow in the trail of the captors. These wretches riﬂe

the houses and strip the helpless, unoffending owners of all they have on earth.

A Traveler’s Description of One of the Indian Groups on

the Trail of Tears

Excerpt from the New York Observer (January 26, 1839)

We found the road literally ﬁlled with the procession for about three miles in

length. The sick and feeble were carried in waggons [sic] . . . a great many ride

horseback and multitudes go on foot—even aged females, apparently nearly ready

to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back—

on the sometimes frozen ground, and sometimes muddy streets, with no covering

for the feet except what nature had given them.

Appendix G

Nez Perce Tribe Removal Teacher Notes

In 1838 Joseph the Elder, a leader of the Nez Perce tribe living in eastern Oregon

and Washington and western Idaho, was baptized as a Christian. He believed in

peace with the white settlers. He was so committed to peace that in 1855 he helped

Washington’s territorial governor organize a Nez Perce reservation so that whites and

Indians could live side by side. In 1863, however, following a prospector’s discovery of

gold in the Nez Perce reservation, the federal government took away 90 percent of the

reservation lands. Joseph the Elder felt betrayed and refused to sign the treaty or move

off the lands that had previously been Nez Perce lands by treaty.

After his death in 1871, Joseph the Elder was succeeded by his son, who became

known as Chief Joseph. Chief Joseph refused all efforts to force his Nez Perce band

onto a greatly diminished reservation and continued to live in the Wallowa Valley

in Oregon and claim its ownership. In 1877 General Oliver Otis Howard prepared a

cavalry attack to force Chief Joseph’s band onto the federal designated land in Idaho.

Wanting to avoid military conﬂict, Chief Joseph agreed and began the march to Idaho.

Angered by what they viewed as unjust conﬁscation of their legal land, about

20 young Nez Perce warriors raided a nearby white settlement, which resulted in the

death of several white settlers. Upon hearing of this raid, the U.S. Army considered

Joseph’s band to be hostile enemies and began pursuit. Faced with U.S. Army action,

Chief Joseph reluctantly agreed with the other leaders to resist.

For the next three months Chief Joseph outmaneuvered the 2,000 troops

pursuing his band of 700 Indians, who were trying to escape to Canada where they

could live in peace in the wilderness. Although Chief Joseph’s band consisted of fewer

than 200 Indian warriors, he successfully used advanced military tactics such as rear

guards, advance guards, skirmishes, and ﬁeld fortiﬁcations to slow down the army’s

advance as he traversed Idaho’s mountains and valleys in a 1,400-mile stealth march

that ended just 40 miles from the Canadian border.

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Chief Joseph surrendered his tired band of exhausted and threadbare band of

women, children, elders, and warriors, who had suffered 200 deaths in what is studied

to this day as an outstanding example of a strategic military retreat. He negotiated

the safe return home for his people, but they were taken ﬁrst to eastern Kansas and

then to a reservation in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) by the federal government. Chief

Joseph went to Washington, D.C., in 1879 to meet with Congress and President Hayes

to advocate for his tribe’s return to the Paciﬁc Northwest, but no action was taken

until six years later, in 1885. At that time half the tribe was returned to the Nez Perce

reservation while the other half of the tribe, including Chief Joseph, was taken to a

non–Nez Perce reservation in northern Washington, separated not only from their

tribal members but also from their homeland in the Wallowa Valley and the Nez Perce

reservation in Idaho.

Chief Joseph died in 1904, still not permitted to return to his homeland or the

tribe’s reservation.

Appendix H

Involuntary Relocation of Native Americans

Nez Perce Tribe Removal Primary

Source Documents

Excerpts from Chester Anders Fee, Chief Joseph: The Biography of a Great Indian (Wilson-Erickson, 1936)

The ﬁrst white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis

and Clark. They brought many things which our people had never seen. They

talked straight and our people gave them a great feast as proof that their hearts

were friendly. They made presents to our chiefs and our people made presents

to them. We had a great many horses of which we gave them what they needed,

and they gave us guns and tobacco in return. All the Nez Perce made friends

with Lewis and Clark and agreed to let them pass through their country and

never to make war on white men. This promise the Nez Perce have never broken.

For a short time we lived quietly. But this could not last. White men had found

gold in the mountains around the land of the Winding Water. They stole a great

many horses from us and we could not get them back because we were Indians.

The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle.

Some white men branded our young cattle so they could claim them. We had no

friends who would plead our cause before the law councils. It seemed to me that

some of the white men in Wallowa were doing these things on purpose to get

up a war. They knew we were not strong enough to ﬁght them. I labored hard

to avoid trouble and bloodshed. We gave up some of our country to the white

men, thinking that then we could have peace. We were mistaken. The white

men would not let us alone. We could have avenged our wrongs many times,

but we did not. Whenever the Government has asked for help against other

Indians we have never refused. When the white men were few and we were

strong we could have killed them off, but the Nez Perce wishes to live at peace.

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At his surrender in the Bear Paw Mountains, 1877

Tell General Howard that I know his heart. What he told me before I have in

my heart. I am tired of ﬁghting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead,

Tu-hul-hil-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who now

say yes or no. He who led the young men [Joseph’s brother Alikut] is dead. It

is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My

people—some of them have run away to the hills and have no blankets and no

food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have

time to look for my children and see how many of them I can ﬁnd. Maybe I

shall ﬁnd them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, my heart is sick and sad.

From where the sun now stands I will ﬁght no more against the white man.

Appendix I

Navajo Tribe Removal Teacher Notes

In 1846 the U.S. government gained control over Navajo lands with the territory

acquired during the Mexican War. After a respected Navajo leader was killed in

1849, relations between white settlers and Indians deteriorated. The military began

establishing forts in the newly acquired territory at the same time that Navajo lands

were being conﬁscated through a series of treaties with different bands of Apaches,

Navajos, Pueblos, Utes, and New Mexicans in an attempt to stop raids. Fort Deﬁance

was established on Navajo land, and the 1858 Treaty of Bonneville angered the Navajo

because it seemed so one-sided against them, as it gave away good grazing land and

forced restitution payments that were not reciprocal.

As the Civil War broke out, friction increased in the Southwest between the

military and the Navajo. But the nation’s attention was diverted elsewhere, so raids

and retributions escalated. After the Union Army had reasserted itself along the Rio

Grande, the U.S. government turned its attention to control of the Southwest lands.

In late 1862 Congress authorized the establishment of Fort Sumner at Bosque

Redondo in New Mexico, a 40-square-mile section designated as the ﬁrst Indian

reservation west of Indian Territory (Oklahoma). In mid-1863, Colonel Kit Carson was

ordered to take troops to accept the surrender of the Navajo, but no Navajo appeared.

Carson then began a scorched-earth campaign to force the surrender of the Navajo.

Carson burned their crops, destroyed their homes, poisoned their water sources, killed

their livestock, and sent patrols to make sure that no hunting or wild food gathering

could take place. Threatened by starvation with winter cold and snows, and harassed

by other tribes who were capturing Navajo as slaves, the tribe could not withstand

Carson’s ﬁnal attack in January 1864.

About 8,500 Navajo were captured and conﬁned at Fort Deﬁance in northeast

Arizona. The military did not have sufﬁcient supplies to feed or transport the Navajo

to the Bosque Redondo reservation about 400 miles east in New Mexico, so many

SPECIAL FOCUS: Migration

Navajo suffered. The ﬁrst Navajo groups began the trek, known as “the Long Walk,” in

August 1863, and continued until March 1864. The 300-mile trip took about 20 days.

More than 200 Navajo died along the way. The second group set out two months after

their defeat by Carson in January 1864.

The detention at Bosque Redondo was an utter failure. The federal government

tried to contain more than 9,000 Indians (including the 500 from the Mescalero

Apache tribe, who were traditional enemies of the Navajo) in a 40-square-mile area

without supplies, an adequate water source, or basics like ﬁrewood and protection

from raids conducted by Comanches. There was also inﬁghting among the Navajo and

Mescalero. More than 2,000 Navajo died of smallpox alone.

A Navajo leader was allowed to go to Washington, D.C., to plead his case. The

result was a visit by federal ofﬁcials to the Bosque Redondo reservation, who returned

with reports that appalled the government. In 1868 the U.S. government signed the

Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the Navajo and allowed them to return to 3.5 million

acres set aside in their homeland area. About 7,000 Navajo then embarked on the

“Long Walk Home.”

Appendix J

Navajo Tribe Removal Primary Source

Documents

All excerpts are from Lawrence C. Kelly, Navajo Roundup (Pruett Publishing Company, 1970).

Brigadier General James H. Carleton’s General Order No. 15, June 15, 1863:

For a long time past the Navajoe [sic] Indians have murdered and robbed the

people of New Mexico. Last winter when eighteen of their chiefs came to Santa

Fe to have a talk, they were warned, — and were told to inform their people, —

that for these murders and robberies the tribe must be punished, unless some

binding guarantees should be given that in [the] future these outrages should

cease. No such guarantees have yet been given: But on the contrary, additional

murders, and additional robberies have been perpetrated upon the persons and

property of unoffending citizens. It is therefore ordered that Colonel Christopher

[“Kit”] Carson, with a proper military force proceed without delay to a point in the

Navajoe country known as Pueblo Colorado [now Ganado, Arizona], and there

establish a defensible Depot for his supplies and Hospital; and thence to prosecute

a vigorous war upon the men of this tribe until it is considered at these Head

Quarters that they have been effectually punished for their long continued atrocities.

Report to General Carleton’s Assistant Adjutant General by Captain Joseph Berney,

who escorted refugees to Fort Sumner during the early months of 1864:

The Indians suffered intensely from the want of clothing, four were entirely frozen to

death…I lost ﬁfteen Indians on the road, principally boys, three of which were stolen,

two strayed from my camp on the Rio Pecos, and ten died from the effects of the cold.

Report from Captain Francis McCabe, who left Fort Deﬁance with 800 Navajo

“prisoners” in the spring of 1864:

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100

I…received rations for the Navajoes for eight days (as far as Fort Wingate) consisting

of one pound of meat or ﬂour, and half a pound of bacon to every indian [sic] woman

and child. On leaving…I directed an ofﬁcer of my Company to move in advance of

the prisoners with a Guard of ﬁfteen men, and I also directed a rear Guard of Non

commissioned Ofﬁcer and ﬁfteen men to be detailed daily…I placed as many of the

women, children and old people as possible in wagons, and had one empty wagon

placed every morning under control of the Ofﬁcer of the day…to receive such sick and

aged indians as might have given out on the march…The main body of the Indians

traveled between the advance Guard and the train [of wagons], and in advance of my

company… On the second days march a very severe snow storm set in which lasted for

four days with unusual severity, and occasioned great suffering amongst the indians,

many of whom were nearly naked and of course unable to withstand such a storm.

British Convict Forced Migration to

Australia: Causes and Consequences

Kathy Callahan

University of Wisconsin–Stout

Menomonie, Wisconsin

Synopsis

The forced migration of thousands of men and women (and boys and girls) was one

means by which the British government dealt with their criminal element in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Called transportation, this forced migration

took persons convicted by British courts to places, successively, such as the North

American colonies, an island on the river Gambia in Africa, and New South Wales,

Australia. In the more than 150-year period in which transportation was used, the

latter destination, New South Wales, became the most important, both in the number

of forced migrants and the resulting creation of a settlement colony. As Parliament,

through the judicial system, forced convicts to this remote location they, either

wittingly or unwittingly, began a pattern that led to the colonization of Australia by

the British. When the male and female migrants arrived, they found a place much

different than home. The climate, plants, animals, and terrain must have been

shocking to these new inhabitants. But they were not alone in Australia. Aboriginal

Australians also lived on the continent, and these indigenous people faced dire

consequences as the British established a new settlement colony “down under.”

AP World History Habits of Mind, Themes, and

Major Developments

This lesson plan, if administered in its entirety, addresses:

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102

• HabitsofMind:allofthoseintherstcategoryand,ifusedwith“An

Eviction Notice from Uncle Sam—Involuntary Relocation of Native

Americans,” (see previous article by Valerie Cox), all of the habits of mind in

the second category;

• EachoftheveAPWorldHistorythemes:interactionbetweenhumansand

the environment; development and interaction of cultures; state-building,

expansion, and conﬂict; creation, expansion, and interaction of economic

systems; and development and transformation of social structures; and

• ForMajorDevelopmentsintheperiod1750–1914,itcoversdemographicand

environmental changes, rise of Western dominance, patterns of cultural and

artistic interactions, and diverse interpretations.

Time Needed to Implement

These lessons, if presented in their entirety, would take two to three class periods,

with homework assignments to be completed outside of class. Each lesson is

freestanding and can be presented on its own. If Lesson 1 is presented on its own, it

would take one and a half class periods, and Lesson 2 would take two full periods.

Learning Objectives

• Tolearnaboutthehistoricaldebatesurroundingasingletopic:thepurpose

of transportation of criminals from Great Britain to Australia;

• Tounderstandhistoricaleventsbyexaminingtheresearchmethodsof

historians;

• Toconveythatunderstandingtoothersthroughwrittenandoral

communication; and

• TolearnabouttheFirstFleet,theestablishmentofasettlementcolonyin

Australia, the Aboriginal Australians, and the interaction of these three

components during British colonization.

Materials Needed

• Worldmap

• Readingmaterialsincluding:

—

Appendix A: Teacher’s Notes on the history of Britain’s transportation

(forced migration) of criminals to Australia.

British Convict Forced Migration to Australia: Causes and Consequences

103

—

Appendix B: Teacher’s Notes on content of The Old Bailey Proceedings

online and accessing them, and notes on terms of transportation.

—

Appendix C: Teacher’s Notes on British money in the eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries.

—

Frost, Alan, and Mollie Gillen. “Botany Bay: An Imperial Venture of the

1780s. The English Historical Review 100: 395 (Apr. 1985): 309-30.

—

Gillen, Mollie. “The Botany Bay Decision, 1786: Convicts, Not Empire.”

The English Historical Review 97: 385 (Oct. 1982): 740-66.

—

Gonner, E. C. K. “The Settlement of Australia.” The English Historical

Review 3: 12 (Oct. 1888): 625-34.

—

Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. New

York: Random House, 1986.

• AccesstotheWorldWideWebforthefollowingmaterial:

—

Proceedings of the Old Bailey www.oldbaileyonline.org

If Web access is not available in the classroom, teachers could print

out cases from one session of London’s Old Bailey court (see Appendix

B for instructions on how to do this). Examining court cases provides

students with numerous examples of the types of crimes for which

individuals were sentenced to transportation.

—

Hakluyt, Richard. Discourse on Western Planting, excerpt: www.

swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/03-hak.html. Also available

in: Andrea, Alfred, and James Overﬁeld. The Human Record: Sources

of Global History, Vol. II, Since 1500, 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin,

2005.

—

Information on Indigenous Persons of Australia, found on the Web site

Indigenous Australia: www.dreamtime.net.au/index.cfm. Accessed June

19, 2008.

Other possible Internet sources as suggested in Lesson 2.

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104

Lesson 1

Historical Debate on the Settlement Colony of Australia

The instructor should ﬁrst present information to the class taken from Appendix A,

the Teacher’s Notes. This should be done in 15–20 minutes on the day prior to Activity

1 or Activity 2.

Assign the articles by Alan Frost, Molly Gillen, and E. C. K. Gonner as suggested

in the activities. Background information of the articles: Frost’s article, as does

Gonner’s, supports the idea that the transportation of prisoners to Australia was a

purposeful act by Parliament that provided a means to colonize Australia with British

men and women. Gillen, on the other hand, disagrees with this premise and offers

detailed information from Parliamentary records and other sources as to why Frost,

Gonner, and others have “missed the boat.” Gonner’s article is included here because

it is seen as the starting point of the debate on Parliament’s intentions. As noted by

the date of publishing, his article appeared only a few years after transportation to

Australia effectively ended in 1868. Frost and Gillen’s articles have appeared more

recently, showing the continuation of the debate. Further, these two authors debate

each other without pulling any punches, each believing that the other is wrong and

saying so. Reading these three articles demonstrates that historical debate often has

a very long life, is alive and well in today’s scholarship, and is an important part of the

process of historical analysis. Below are several reading questions that could be given

to students to guide them through the articles. Is it strongly suggested that teachers

read over the articles before assigning them, as they are challenging. Since a teacher

knows his or her students, he or she might want to construct additional guiding

questions.

Reading Questions

• Allauthors

—

What is the author’s thesis statement?

—

What primary and secondary evidence is used in the text to support

his/her thesis?

—

What conclusions does each author draw? Are they valid conclusions

based on the evidence presented? Why or why not?

—

Since it is unlikely that you will read all of the cited primary sources

yourself, how do you determine if they were used correctly?

British Convict Forced Migration to Australia: Causes and Consequences

105

—

Can both Frost and Gillen be correct? Which author makes the most

credible argument? Why?

• Gonner

—

On what basis does Gonner argue the proposed site on Botany Bay was

for more than merely a penal colony?

—

Examine the appendix of his article. How do these sources give

credibility to his argument?

• Gillen

—

What is the “ﬂax theory”? Argument against this theory is a major part

of Gillen’s argument. Why does she dismiss it? What is her evidence?

What are other reasons she disagrees with earlier scholarship?

—

What plans for transportation did the British government explore after

1776?

—

What problems did they encounter as they explored these plans, and

what problems did they encounter with convicts between 1776 and

1786?

—

Why does she ultimately conclude that the British government initially

had no other plans for Australia other than those for a penal colony?

• Frost

Note: This article was written as a reaction to Gillen’s article.

—

Gillen is then given an opportunity to respond to Frost. This is a common

means employed by academic journals to debate contentious topics.

—

The primary goals of Frost’s article are to (1) defend himself and his

ideas; and (2) debunk the assertions Gillen made in her article. Does he

accomplish his goals?

—

How does Frost approach the primary sources in the construction of

his argument? Doesn’t he use some of the same sources as does Gillen?

How does he use them differently than she does?

—

What is his ﬁnal assertion? Do you think his methodology and

conclusion are sound?

—

What is Gillen’s response? Is her argument constructive? Does it answer

your questions about the debate, or does her defense leave you with