| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Hans-Jürgen Grabbe. Vor der großen Flut: Die europäische Migration in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika 1783–1820. (USA-Studien, number 10.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2001. Pp. 458. € 71.00.

Migration studies have traditionally isolated a particular group in its time and place and then studied the motion of that group using letters, port and local tax records, and, in the case of German emigrants, the Ortssippenbücher (collections of family papers, organized by locale.) Sometimes the migration of the group is juxtaposed against larger patterns of conflict or socioeconomic changes, sometimes not. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, however, has assembled this kind of documentary trail not simply for one group or region but for the whole of northwestern Europe over five decades studded with wars and changes in colonial status. It is an ambitious approach, and the result is a remarkably useful book. 1

Historians of early U.S. immigration often struggle with the problematic nature of ships' papers and port records. Documents on one side of the Atlantic do not necessarily match those on the other, and population statistics in early American cities frequently imply a much higher rate of immigration than surviving papers would confirm. This is particularly the case with Philadelphia and New York. Grabbe concedes these difficulties in his first chapter and provides an impressive summary of the varying estimates of early American immigration. . . .

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