The most recommended books about human migration

Faragher’s book created quite a stir when it came out in 2005, especially among Acadians. For here was an author who had no Acadian roots who saw the tragedy of the Acadian Deportation from the perspective of their ancestors. The history recounted in the book provides rich details on how and why in 1755 troops from New England sought to carry out their "great and noble scheme" of expelling 18,000 French-speaking Acadians ("the neutral French") from Nova Scotia. The removals would last eight years with thousands of Acadians forcibly relocated, a large number died, families often separated, and others going into hiding in forests. Faragher tells the story with a strong, highly readable narrative.

Mining contemporaneous news accounts, personal letters and diaries, and dozens of in-depth interviews, scholar Marcia Chatelain explores the impact that the Great Migration had on a generation of young Black Chicago women, who coped with coming of age in the urban North while shouldering the expectations and aspirations of their uprooted parents. Anyone new to Chatelain’s work should also check out her next and equally original book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, a study of the deeply mixed legacy of McDonald’s restaurants in Black neighborhoods that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History.

The issue of when one can call a dispersal a ‘diaspora’ has been a long-running debate between those interesting in diasporas. Displaced peoples can return, fragment, or assimilate. What factors are in play that impel any one ethnic group to cohere, link to similar communities aboard and continue to connect, emotionally and in other ways, to their place of origin? This is a tough question to answer and Van Hear has a brave try in answering it. He has undertaken field research in Africa and Sri Lanka and his command of the sources and comparisons is impressive. Of course, there are many refugee flows that post-date this book, but it nonetheless stands as a first crack at addressing the issue of diasporic formation.

This book takes the idea of “badass” to another level of meaning and measure.

Here, Hattie is a mother of twelve children of various stories and in some ways, a stand-in for all mothers who made the migration north from the deep south of the United States. She’s tough but loving and endures the kind of struggles that would knock many people down.

It’s a book that keeps you turning the pages. 

Dennis Stanford one of the Clovis first police, changed his mind about the Clovis first hypothesis after carrying out excavations along the mid-Atlantic coast of North America. This book provides an informed view of pre-Clovis sites, paleo climates, and the possibilities for human migrations between the eastern and western hemispheres via the Atlantic. Evidence for human migrations between the eastern hemisphere known today as Southern France and the Western Hemisphere known today as the Americas during the Pleistocene are supported through rigorous research and possible linkages between stone tools known as Solutrean technologies found in both areas.

This product of intensive research by members of the Department of Geography at Cork University covers every aspect of the famine as experienced by the people who lived and died through it.

Lavishly illustrated with maps and facsimiles of actual documents it details everything from the design and administration of workhouses to the treatment of migrants upon arrival in Canada, the USA, and Australia. No other book provides such an eloquent and devastating narrative of the suffering experienced by Irish people during the period 1845-52.

Devoid of rhetoric, it displays the facts in easy-to-understand text and statistical analysis, enhanced with first-hand eye-witness accounts from letters and journal extracts.

This handsome coffee table book with short, topical essays by Ben Finney, Geoffrey Irwin, Sam Low, and others is focused on Polynesian voyaging. Richly illustrated with paintings, photographs, and maps, it brings together the major threads: oral traditions, canoe design, navigational methods, theories of settlement. Most of the content can be found elsewhere, but the presentation is impressive; if you wanted just one book to browse through, this would be a fun one to have.

When we think of slavery in American History, we mostly think of African Americans enslaved by white settlers. Paul Conrad tells a different story. Focusing on the Apache and through the often poignant stories of particular Apache women and men over the course of four centuries, he details their experience as shifting webs of alliance led to their enslavement by the Spanish and the Mexicans on the North American mainland and Cuba, and imprisoned and held in unfreedom by the United States through the 1880s, and yet still holding onto their identity as a distinct people with a distinct culture.

I cut my environmental historian’s teeth on Ecological imperialism. While not entirely about animals, Crosby’s book was the first to suggest to me how nonhuman creatures could influence human history. This is an environmental history classic by the author who coined the now widely used term “the Columbian Exchange.” In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby expands upon this concept to argue that European colonizing successes were due in large part to the introduction Old World animals, plants, and diseases to the Americas and elsewhere. Colonists reshaped the environment, creating ecological “Neo-Europes” in the New World. What I took away from this book was the novel notion that animals could be active colonizers themselves. I learned that animals could be responsible for changing the landscape and carrying foreign cultures into new lands. 

This book is many things: A wonderful ethnography, a tribute to the Mexican and foreign ethnographers who preceded Re Cruz’s in the area, a call to ethnographers for writing creativity, and, glowingly, a show of respect for local people, their agency, and their understandings of the world.

Chan Kom, as Re Cruz reminds us, has been an ethnographic laboratory since the first decades of the 20th century. Re Cruz chose to structure her book following the script of a local play performed by high school students. For anthropology students this is a good example of an engaging ethnography.

For historians of the recent past this is a record of the cultural impact that the emergence of Cancun had on Yucatecan rural life.