Show notes
If we want to understand how and why the human story has unfolded in the way it has, then we have to understand migration: large numbers of people moving long distances. It's a surprisingly difficult topic to understand, but in the past couple of decades, we've developed better ideas and more tools for making sense of migration, past and present. Follow along for an overview of the topic, how it's been studied in the past, and how we understand it now. Patrick launched a brand-new history show! It’s called Past Lives, and every episode explores the life of a real person who lived in the past.
Highlighted moments
The most basic change we can make to better understand migration is to treat it not as a separate category, but as a related manifestation of mobility.
“Imagine arguing that the rise of Tupperware in American suburbs after World War II was evidence of a vast new migration of a coherent group of people, the Tupperware people, from far away, and you're not too far off.”
“The migration had already happened centuries earlier by the time the material markers we recognize appeared.”
“It's actually further from Oaxaca's capital city to the Arizona border than it is from the Arizona border to Yakima.”
Transcript
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