World History II

Chapter 25: Africa, Southwest Asia, and the New Imperialism
1800 to 1914

33: Wed, Jan 8, 2020

Please post in the forum for the day a short essay in response to this question:

Here are some links to different sources relating to people moving from one country to another in the period under discussion. Some correspond with the larger trends we've seen, some do not. The question here — and this points to your upcoming primary-source investigations — is not so much a general one about the migration as such, but rather the historiographical question, what kinds of information does each of these show us? You don't have to be thorough: it probably would be impossible, at any rate. What we'd most like you to consider is what kinds of questions they individually might raise and/or answer.

• Immigrants to Australia:
  Documents in the State Library of South Australia.
   
• Irish Immigrants to Pennsylvania:
  Documents from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
   
• An Indian Station Master in Africa:
  Requesting leave from his position to go home and marry his fiancée, at the "Thee Agora" site.
   
• “The Ghost and the Darkness”
  The international assortment of people — some native, some Indian, and some European — who ran afoul of two legendary man-eating lions in Tsavo during the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway, again from the "Thee Agora" site.
   
• And finally...Lafcadio Hearn, 1850-1904:
  Hearn was one of the strangest all-over-the-world travelers there has ever been — born in Greece, he returned home to his father's native Ireland, emigrated from there to the United States and wound up in Japan as a journalist and defender of Japanese culture — accepted into Japanese culture, in fact, as almost a samurai. Here are:
  • The Wikipedia article about Hearn. 
  • An assortment of his writings. 
  
  You are of course not expected to read all of any of them, but it might amuse you to dip into them here or there — especially the Life and Letters collections edited by Bisland. 

Mostly this not-quite-a-question is an invitation to explore a bit and to speculate on where these sources could take you.

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