Title: Free to Move? The Law and Politics of Internal Migration in Twentieth-Century America
Description: The history of the United States in the mid-twentieth century is, in significant measure, a history of internal migration. Between 1930 and 1970, as national quota laws kept the nation's foreign-born population at record low levels, the attention of journalists, lawmakers, jurists, social workers, civil rights activists, and the broader public turned to internal migration. The rapid pace of urbanization and the industrialization of agriculture made internal migration a pressing national question and a flashpoint in American politics. Migration was implicated in many of the seminal events of the era: from the Dust Bowl Migration to the Second Great Migration, the New Deal to the Great Society, the Bonus Army to the Watts Riots.