Book Review

Canada and the United States

This book represents the summation of nearly three decades of work by Douglas K. Meyer to understand the historical geographic contours of migration and settlement in nineteenth-century Illinois. At its core is a complex migration model that will sharpen the logic of specialists but, alas, confound many general readers. Essentially, Meyer argues that migration is a complex individual and group human activity that becomes more complex as more individuals and groups migrate by raising questions about how each of these individuals and groups effected or were affected before, during, and after migration by the society and culture around them. Meyer argues that we have lost our nuanced understanding of the "extent, persistence, and influence of America's immigrant diversity" (p. xiii). The linear core of the model is the familiar chain of migration in which "push factors" at home motivate one to leave and "pull factors" at various destination points draw one where to go. Among possible destination points, those places with the clearest and strongest "place images"—created by immigrant guides and advertising as well as word of mouth information—become most deeply planted in immigrants "cognitive" or "mental maps" and thus attract the most people. Determining those places helps explain the pattern of migration. Once clusters of immigrants are planted, they exert their own attractive force, and, as accessibility increases with improvement of transportation, and places are further differentiated between attractive and nonattractive, the chain between home and a destination point is strengthened and becomes "channelized" (p. 61) by ever more linkages into a fixed "interconnected route." It is the intertwining of these routes, even as they continue to be altered by "spatial processes" (p. xiv) such as emerging transportation networks and economic and urban development, that forms the underlying dynamic of layering of various sequential migration patterns over time, that explains the creation of the diverse "quilt" that makes up nineteenth-century Illinois's population. The difficult task of geographically analyzing this complex spatial process over time is Meyer's goal. For the most part, he achieves it.

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