Robert P. Swierenga

Dutch International Migration Statistics, 1820-1880: An Analysis of Linked Multinational Nominal Files

International migration statistics in the nineteenth century are acknowledged to be deficient and biased, but there are few source-critical studies to determine the extent of underreporting and omissions. This article provides a critical analysis of the statistics of Dutch emigration to North America in the period 1835–1880, based on the method of nominal record-linkage of computer files derived from Netherlands emigration lists and U.S. ship passenger manifests. Published and unpublished official records in the Netherlands, U.S.A. and Canada are used to determine the extent of underreporting, the structural biases in the migration data and the “true” annual Dutch immigration rate to the United States.

Ethnocultural Political Analysis: A New Approach to American Ethnic Studies

At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their book Beyond the Melting Pot traced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for die New York Times and author of The American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.

Land Speculator “Profits” Reconsidered: Central Iowa as a Test Case

“Show us a non-resident who has made money speculating in western land,†wrote a frontier newspaper editor in 1850, “and we will show you a rare bird, more rare by far than a successful gold hunter.†Despite this warning and dozens like it, thousands of investors ventured surplus or borrowed funds on frontier land throughout the nineteenth century. Many, in fact, jumped from one frontier to the next on the heels of government surveyors and land officers. Either these businessmen were gluttons for punishment, or speculating in government land was far more rewarding than some contemporaries were willing to admit.

Acres for cents : delinquent tax auctions in frontier Iowa

One of the unexplored facets of American land history is the annual tax sale for delinquent property taxes. Only the depression crisis of the early 1930s gave national notoriety to tax auctions because of the nearly total collapse of the property-tax system.1 But the flurry of interest was shortlived once the economy recovered. In the nineteenth century the story was quite different. The fall tax auction was a red-letter date on the community calendar. It was announced in the local press a month in advance by an itemized tally of delinquent lands that squeezed most of .

Beyond the Civil War synthesis : political essays of the Civil War era

This collection brings together eighteen outstanding essays originally published in Civil War History. All of the contributions are recent. They reflect the latest scholarship on the nonmilitary aspects of the Civil War--revisionist viewpoints that are often derived from new social statistical methodologies.

The Equity Effects of Public Land Speculation in Iowa: Large versus Small Speculators

The economic impact of American public land policies in the nineteenth century can be assessed either in terms of their efficiency or equity effects, that is, their impact on national growth rates or on income distribution. Robert W. Fogel and Jack Rutner recently explored the growth question and discovered that federal land policy had a positive but minimal effect on economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the equity question is perhaps more important than the efficiency issue, a point made several years earlier by Douglass C. North.