Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Black Economic ◽  
Black Residents

This introductory chapter outlines the central themes and methodologies underpinning this book. It discusses the factors for slow black economic progress in the North following the Great Black Migration. Despite the promise of the North and despite optimistic predictions, black migration to industrial cities did not lead to economic parity with whites either for the migrants themselves or for their children during the mid-twentieth century. This chapter introduces a new element to the story by pointing out that that the persistent influx of black migrants to northern labor and housing markets had created competition for existing black residents in an economic setting already constrained by weakening labor demand and northern racism.

Black Migration from the South in Historical Context

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Economic Returns ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
European Immigration

This chapter explains that the mobility of black southerners began increasing in the birth cohorts born immediately after the Civil War. Many of these moves took place within the South. Despite plentiful industrial jobs in the “thousand furnaces” of northern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the potential wage benefits of settling in the North was dampened by the absence of a migrant network that southern blacks could use to secure employment upon arrival. Large flows of northward migration awaited a period of abnormally high economic returns, which arose during World War I. Circa 1915, northern factories supplying the war effort experienced a surge in labor demand, coupled with a temporary freeze in European immigration, which encouraged northern employers to turn to other sources of labor.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The North ◽  
Almost All

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Christianity in the twentieth century. The twentieth century has suffered comparative neglect at the hands of modern Western historians of Christianity, who have, on the whole, remained more interested in the intellectual and social challenges posed to the European churches in the nineteenth century. Yet it was the twentieth century that shaped the contours of the Christian faith as it is now, a culturally plural and geographically polycentric religion clustered around a number of new metropolitan loci in the non-European world. The majority of its rapidly growing number of adherents found the post-Enlightenment questions that preoccupied the churches of the North and West to be remote from their pressing everyday concerns of life and death, sickness and healing, justice and poverty. In Islamic regions of Africa and in almost all of Asia, they were also intimately concerned with the implications of living as religious minorities in a context dominated by the majority religious tradition. Their theological priorities and ethical perspectives differed accordingly from those of Christians in the North. The twentieth century thus set the agenda for the theological and ethical issues that now constitute the fault lines dividing Christians and churches from each other. The twentieth century has thus made it necessary for students of ecumenism to redraw the map of Christian unity and disunity.

scholarly journals Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migration and Racial Wage Convergence in the North, 1940–1970

2009 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 755-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
Wage Growth ◽  
Elasticity Of Substitution ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Net Migration ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Economic ◽  
Skill Groups ◽  
Over Time

Four million blacks left the South from 1940 to 1970, doubling the northern black workforce. I exploit variation in migrant flows within skill groups over time to estimate the elasticity of substitution by race. I then use this estimate to calculate counterfactual rates of wage growth. I find that black wages in the North would have been around 7 percent higher in 1970 if not for the migrant influx, while white wages would have remained unchanged. On net, migration was an avenue for black economic advancement, but the migration created both winners and losers.

Competition in the Promised Land

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
Local Public Services ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Economic

From 1940 to 1970, nearly four million black migrants left the American rural South to settle in the industrial cities of the North and West. This book provides a comprehensive account of the long-lasting effects of the influx of black workers on labor markets and urban space in receiving areas. Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. This book challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. The book shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth. Furthermore, many white households responded to the black migration by relocating to the suburbs. White flight was motivated not only by neighborhood racial change but also by the desire on the part of white residents to avoid participating in the local public services and fiscal obligations of increasingly diverse cities. Employing historical census data and state-of-the-art econometric methods, this book revises our understanding of the Great Black Migration and its role in the transformation of American society.

Modernizing America

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
New Exodus ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The North ◽  
The Difference

As late as 1911, a leading American geographer could confidently assert that blacks in the United States would always live chiefly in "the warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic states," "where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive"; nature decreed that few would ever settle and fewer survive in the North because they could not withstand the cold. Events, though, were contradicting this blend of racial and climatic determinism. Black migration from the South to the colder states was already substantial. It intensified dramatically during World War I. A boom in labor demand in industry, along with a near-cessation of the immigration from Europe that had once filled it, drew black and white southerners alike in unheard-of numbers to the manufacturing cities of the North. The black exodus to Kansas in 1879 and 1880 had briefly looked as if it would become just such a mass interregional movement of population. But the pioneer Exodusters had suffered from the drastic change in climate, most of all because it affected their livelihoods in farming. Their skills, which lay in cotton growing, were useless in Kansas, and their experience did little to encourage others to follow. The great northward migration of the early twentieth century was a migration not to new farmlands but to the cities for factory and service employment. The difference in climate between southern origin and northern destination did not matter much to it. White southern farmers, fearing the loss of cheap labor, warned departing blacks that they would find the winters of the North too bitter to endure. The new exodus proceeded all the same, and it discredited in the process the long-held idea that either race or habit always imposed a latitudinal pattern on human movement. The change in climate from South to North did mean discomfort or worse for many who undertook it. They suffered especially from the unaccustomed cold that few could afford stoves and fuel to ward off—though they had suffered too from inadequate shelter and clothing in the southern winter.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Kampungs and Conflict in Colonial Semarang

1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
North Coast ◽  
The North ◽  
Central Java ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.

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