Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History.

Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History. Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton. (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2002. Pp. [vi], 176. $35.00, ISBN 90-5383-839-2.)

For historians like me, who are American-born students of American history, it can be an enlightening experience to read works on American history written by foreign historians. An opportunity to momentarily escape the insularity of our native-born historical viewpoints is perhaps the most rewarding thing that awaits the reader of Nation on the Move, a collection of eleven essays that are occasionally enlightening and sometimes novel in their approach to American history.

Given the fact that all but one of the contributors are European-based historians, one might expect Nation on the Move to focus on the dynamics of transatlantic migration. Instead, the common denominator here is some sort of concentration on American domestic "vertical" and "horizontal" migration--"geographical and social mobility within the United States" (p. 2). The boundaries have been so loosely defined that some of the essays only address the central theme of migration in the most peripheral manner, such as Robert M. Lewis's study of California gold miners' daguerreotypes or David Brown's analysis of Hinton Rowan Helper's The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction (Baltimore, Md., 1855). Even historians who live and breathe for migration studies will find some of these essays at best only mildly interesting and relevant. As with any collection of essays, quality is uneven, and, despite the relative brevity of the collection, a more liberal use of the editor's knife would have rendered most of the essays a little more accessible.

Among the more valuable of the essays are Serge Ricard's "U.S. Continental Aggrandizement: Squatter Expansionism as the Mainspring of the National Experience" and Ole O. Moen's "Mobility, Geographic and Social: The American Dream and American Realities." Building on his earlier work on Americans' "manifest destiny," Ricard treats the old expansionist chicken-or-egg question--did national policies and laws spur popular attitudes and movements or vice versa?--and sides with historians of an earlier generation, such as Ray A. Billington, who argued that American "expansionism was essentially a popular movement" (p. 54). Moen's essay focuses on more recent American mobility by analyzing the unintended yet socially dichotomizing effects of the automobile on American culture and society. He finds that "The ubiquity of the private motorcar has been allowed to mask the real state of affairs by displaying a lot of physical mass mobility--implanting in the general public an impression of real, social mobility ..." (p. 173).

A handful of essays will be of particular interest to historians of the South. In his study of travel patterns and social status in the colonial Chesapeake region, Zbigniew Mazur finds the roots of America's "extremely mobile communities" and "an ideology within which physical mobility was a highly desired value on which social stratification was based ..." (p. 32). In a study of mobility among slave overseers, James Baird argues that eighteenth-century Virginia was not the stable and orderly place so often depicted in history and that "the imperatives of market production more than those of patriarchal obligation, motivated gentry slaveholders in their relationships with slave overseers" (p. 36). David Brown asserts that Hinton Rowan Helper's travels in California during the early 1850s provided "a crucial developmental stage" in an intellectual journey that eventually produced The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York, 1857). Giovanni Fabbi's essay, "Black Migration and Military Mobilization in South Carolina during World War I," is, unfortunately, both poorly written and awkwardly constructed.

All in all, this is a collection whose component parts will appeal primarily to a small group of scholars with interest in general American migration or in the respective essay topics.

Lyon College

BROOKS BLEVINS