Defining the Diaspora: Appalachians in the Great Migration

Abstract

New scholarship on southern white out-migration challenges long-held views regarding the economic difficulties experienced by Appalachian white migrants in the North. A comparison of the experiences of Appalachian white migrants and other southern white migrants during a forty-year period, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series files (IPUMS), shows that Appalachian migrants were significantly more impoverished than were other southern white migrants. As recent research suggests, migrants from the non-Appalachian South made a smooth economic transition, but migrants from the southern Appalachian region were nearly as impoverished as southern African-American migrants and international immigrants from the poorest developing countries. For these groups, the economic transition was a slow and difficult process.

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