Abstract
Current knowledge of migration in history comes mainly from quantitative sources such as census birthplace data, registration records, ship passenger records, or journeymen registers. Although census data give a continuous record of both when and where people moved to, such sources provide very little contextual information to explain why some individuals take the opportunity to leave, while others in the same locality, class, and occupation do not. As Dirk Hoerder (1996, 217) has reminded us, the general economic, social, and political forces we use to explain international migrations seem quite plausible when applied to regions and masses of people, but markedly less so when we consider the individual, whose motivations might be much more complicated than the sum of push and pull forces taken into consideration. Since quantitative analyses will only result in a partial picture of migration cultures in past societies, scholars have begun to incorporate into their analyses more qualitative documents such as diaries, letters, testaments, and various others. In addition, oral history has also gained important methodological currency in migration studies.
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Saurer, E., Steidl, A. (2012). Ego Documents Entered Migration History. In: Messer, M., Schroeder, R., Wodak, R. (eds) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0950-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0950-2_14
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