Understanding the demographic, technological, and cultural pressures that prompt migration fascinates me. What makes a person leave behind everything they have ever known to go somewhere they have never seen, knowing the move is probably permanent? What features of individual and group identity are most important when you are on the other side of the world from everything that previously formed that identity? Examining such questions makes me reflect on my life and what makes me me. For example, visiting Scotland for my PhD research made me realize that I was not ‘New Zealand European’ but a New Zealander, which is a distinct identity.
I wrote
From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand's Scots Migrants 1840-1920
Data-driven migration research is my absolute favorite kind of migration literature. While this book excels at this, and a truly robust sample of migrants underpins it as a whole, the statistics that underpin the research are presented so that they wouldn’t scare a non-specialist reader.
It is a model of how to make data-driven research accessible to a general readership. I love how it is neatly divided into thematic sections by birthplace, but nevertheless avoids repetition. If I had to recommend just one book to someone about British and Irish migration to Aotearoa this would be it. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a general overview of the major trends.
This book explores the question of who New Zealand's Pakeha ancestors were. It presents and interprets the findings of a major statistical analysis of immigrants from the United Kingdom over a century and a half drawn from death registers and shipping records. The book looks at for the first time and in detail such issues as the geographical origins of the founding ancestors, their occupational and class background, their religions and their values. Did our forefathers and mothers come from particular areas of Britain, did they tend to practise certain occupations, were they Catholics or Protestants, working people or aristocrats?…
What I love most about this book is the focus on women. That sounds really obvious, given the title, but it’s unusual. Male migrants are so easy to find in historical sources. On shipping lists, women and children were often only recorded as ‘wife and 5 children’ of a named man.
Due to this bias in the primary sources, men are usually at the center of 19th-century migration literature. Their experience is taken as the norm. Their motivations are assumed to be the ones guiding the migration. So I really love that this spotlight on women highlights the experiences and importance of these migrants to New Zealand and also that it has forced historians who have come after this publication to try harder to include women in their migration stories, too.
Between the 1840s and 1880s, thousands of young single women came to New Zealand as assisted migrants from Britain and Ireland. In this detailed study of forgotten lives, Charlotte Macdonald highlights the experiences and identities of a vitally important migrant group, one previously overshadowed by the stories of gold diggers, pastoralists, soldiers, adventurers and agricultural labourers.Macdonald, a pioneer of research into women’s history, brings a new perspective on New Zealand’s European settlement. Her compelling study will appeal to anyone seeking to investigate the origins of contemporary New Zealand identity.
There is a lot to love about this book. The level of detail about every element of Scottish ethnicity under consideration is extraordinary. Bueltmann seems to leave no stone unturned in her examination of Scottish associations. I am always a big fan of historical databases, so the analysis based on the database compiled for this research of society members, based on extant sources, is a big selling point for me.
Many society membership lists have been lost to history, and the New Zealand census returns were systematically destroyed, so compiling such a database was no mean feat. What has always most strongly stuck with me, though, is how the stories of individual migrants are woven throughout, not just thrown in as examples but integral to understanding the phenomena she is exploring. John Jack and family, for example, turn up at different points in their lives at different points in the book.
The Scots accounted for around a quarter of all UK-born immigrants to New Zealand between 1861 and 1945, but have only been accorded scant attention in New Zealand histories, specialist immigration histories and Scottish Diaspora Studies. This is all the more peculiar because the flow of Scots to New Zealand, although relatively unimportant to Scotland, constituted a sizable element to the country's much smaller population. Seen as adaptable, integrating relatively more quickly than other ethnic migrant groups in New Zealand, the Scots' presence was obscured by a fixation on the romanticised shortbread tin facade of Scottish identity overseas. Uncovering Scottish…
I love that this book tells a bleak migration story–the stories of those for whom migration was the beginning of a period of struggle. The most often told migration stories are the successful ones. The migrants who arrived in their new land and excelled–built a business empire, became prime minister, bought up huge swathes of land, and passed their wealth onto their descendants. Even at the time, letters home to family who stayed behind seldom spoke of hardship or difficulties.
Taking lunatic asylum records as its core source, this book allows this other end of the settler experience spectrum to be examined through an institutional lens that is perhaps less widely consulted than it deserves to be.
This book provides a social, cultural, and political history of migration, ethnicity, and madness in New Zealand between 1860 and 1910. Its key aim is to analyse the ways that patients, families, asylum officials, and immigration authorities engaged with the ethnic backgrounds and migration histories and pathways of asylum patients and why. Exploring such issues enables us to appreciate the difficulties that some migrants experienced in their relocation abroad, hardships that are often elided in studies of migration that focus on successful migrant settlement.
Drawing upon lunatic asylum records (including patient casebooks and committal forms), immigration files, surgeon superintendents reports,…
What I love most about this book is its challenge for New Zealand historians to examine the role of different British cultures in shaping New Zealand society. Akenson, a Canadian author, took a one-year research fellowship in New Zealand, and this resulting book has changed the face of migration studies in New Zealand in the decades since.
He describes previous works as cementing a tradition of biculturalism, ‘lumping… all white settlers into a spurious unity’, but more than just laying down the challenge to do something about that ‘lumping,’ he then shows a way forward, examining the Irish in New Zealand. Marvellous!
Scots made up nearly 20 percent of New Zealand's immigrant population in 1920, but until recently, the exact origins of New Zealand's Scots migrants have remained blurred.
My book establishes for the first time key characteristics of the Scottish migrants arriving in Aotearoa, New Zealand, between 1840 and 1920, addressing five core questions: From where in Scotland did they come? Who came? When? In what numbers? And where did they settle? It also addresses issues of internal migration within Scotland, individual and generational occupational mobility, migration among Shetland migrants, and return migration.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
