Atlas of American Migration
This source, rather than having an alphabetical or chronological arrangement, is divided into 10 thematic chapters, from "A Shifting Mosaic: America and Migration," to "The Suburban Frontier: Migration Since 1945." Intervening chapters cover such topics as slavery, Native American migration, the settlement of the West, and the move to the cities after 1890. Each chapter is an extended essay that is broken into various headings and subheadings. The most important features of the atlas are the many tables, graphs, and maps. For example, chapter two, "The Earliest Americans: Pre-Columbian Migration," has a time line as well as maps showing, among other things, settlement in the Pre-Columbian Southwest, distribution of the Mississippi Temple Mound culture, Norse exploration, and Native American language families. The chapter on American slavery, entitled "Migration in Chains," includes the maps "Underground Railroad," "Slave Revolt and Flight," and "Slavery's Westward Migration after 1820," among others. All maps were created especially for this volume. Data in charts and tables were drawn primarily from sources such as the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The volume concludes with a selected bibliography, mostly of secondary sources, and an index. The index would be improved if it identified the illustrations, maps, and other graphics that are listed.We the People: An Atlas of America's Diversity(Macmillan, 1988) also looks at migration patterns in the U.S. A more scholarly source, it is now somewhat out-of-date.Atlas of American Migrationcontains information up to the mid-1990s. Because of its arrangement, libraries may be tempted to put it in the circulating collection. However, it contains many valuable maps and statistics for reference use in high-school, public, and academic libraries.