The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860
by Marcus Lee Hansen
Summary
Marcus Lee Hansen's study follows the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic from the founding of Jamestown to the eve of the Civil War, treating what earlier historians had often described as scattered waves of settlement as a single continuous migration shaped by consistent forces: overcrowded farmland and religious dissent in Europe, the pull of cheap American land, and the shipping networks and labor markets that carried people across the ocean and then inland. Hansen moves between the German states, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Britain on one side of the Atlantic and the American seaboard and frontier on the other, arguing that migration was not a background condition of early American history but one of its central, organizing forces.
Hansen spent three years working through archives across Europe before his death in 1938 cut the project short, and the manuscript reached print only because the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. turned his unfinished drafts into a publishable book. That origin shows in places where the argument runs dense and the prose plain rather than polished, but the underlying research is exhaustive, and the book reads as a foundational survey rather than a narrative built around individual lives. It suits a reader who wants immigration explained as a structural feature of American growth, driven by economics and demography as much as by any single immigrant's story, from a historian who trained under Frederick Jackson Turner and brought Turner's sense of large historical forces to a subject Turner himself had mostly left alone.
Historical Context & Significance
The Atlantic Migration won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for History, three years after Hansen's death in 1938, making it a posthumous award. The book appeared in 1940 only because Schlesinger Sr. completed the editorial work Hansen's death had left undone.
The prize, and the book itself, helped establish immigration as a central subject of American historical writing rather than a peripheral one, work that Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted, the 1952 winner of the same prize, would carry forward a decade later in a very different, more literary register. Hansen is also remembered for a separate 1938 essay proposing what became known as Hansen's law, on how ethnic identity can resurface in a third generation after fading in the second, a hypothesis later immigration historians have tested with mixed results but that remains widely cited.