Session Abstract

The session will address various migration patterns and different ways of adapting to a new society in the US of various social, cultural, religious, and ethnic groups from the multiethnic Habsburg Monarchy in the late 19^th and first half of the 20^th century, by using different historical material and various methods. Social scientists and historians have developed a rich body of research on transatlantic migration during the 19^th and 20^th centuries but most studies have addressed migration as a phenomenon affecting either individual nation states or individual ethnicities. To overcome the limitations of an ethnic centered historiography and its self-referential evaluations, the comparative approach has served a valuable purpose. The extensive territory of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy serves as an excellent case study for such an analysis. This session will present papers from a bigger research project, which has been conducted at the Center for Austrian Studies, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The project will use census material from the Minnesota Population Center, as well as more qualitative documents from the Immigration History Research Center as well as the Minnesota Historical Society.