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The mass migration of African Americans out of the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century represents one of the most significant internal migration flows in U.S.History: Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants' success in translating their geographic mobility into economic mobility. Due in part to the lack of a large body of longitudinal data, almost all studies of the Great Migration have focused on the migrants themselves, usually over short periods of their working lives. Using longitudinally linked census data, we take a broader view, investigating the long-term economic and social effects of the Great Migration on the migrants' children. Our results reveal modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status for the African American children of the Great Migration relative to the children of southerners who remained in the South. In contrast, second-generation white migrants experienced few benefits from migrating relative to southern or northern stayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest George Ravenstein's influential "laws of migration" argued that short- distance and within- country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census microdata to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth- century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant flaw in Ravenstein's key finding on gender and that this flaw has implications for more recent scholarship of the long- term "feminization of migration." The apparent overrepresentation of women among internal migrants was due not to their higher propensity to move but to the much higher rate at which male migrants left the population, through either death or emigration. Men were just as likely to make internal moves as women were; the difference was that men did not remain in the population to be counted when the decennial census was conducted. Like Ravenstein's "laws of migration," this article relies primarily on data from the 1881 census of England and Wales. Whereas Ravenstein's work was constrained by the contents of tables published by the UK Census Office in the 1880s, we are able to ask new questions by analyzing individual- level data files recently made available by the North Atlantic Population Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the incidence and meaning of return migration that took place during the twentieth-century "Great Migration" of southern whites and African-Americans to the U.S. North and West. Southern whites in particular had an unusually high rate of return, though this pattern varied significantly from one northern city to another. After presenting an overview of return movement in the Great Migration, this article compares migrants' experiences in two northern cities that had very different histories of return migration. Southern migrants to Indianapolis, Indiana, came mainly from a relatively prosperous southern region to which they returned with great frequency. Southern migrants to Cincinnati, Ohio, on the other hand, moved from one of the most impoverished subregions of the Appalachian South and were much more likely to choose life in the North over a questionable future at home. Ultimately, Cincinnati's migrants drew on their common sense of exile to build a vocal migrant community in the North, while Indianapolis's migrants showed no similar efforts. The two cases together demonstrate the importance of understanding the tight relationship between patterns in return migration and migrant community development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]