Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
The Great Departure
- Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
Buy Now for £18.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas, irrevocably changing both their new lands and the ones they left behind. Their immigration fostered an idea of the "land of the free", yet more than a third returned home again. In a groundbreaking study, Tara Zahra brilliantly explores the deeper story of this unprecedented movement of people.
As villages emptied, some blamed traffickers in human labor, targeting Jewish emigration agents. Others saw opportunity: to seed colonies of migrants like the Polish community in Argentina or to gain economic advantage from an inflow of foreign currency or to reshape their populations by encouraging the emigration of minorities. These precedents would shape the Holocaust, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and tragedies of ethnic cleansing while also forming notions of social solidarity, human rights, and freedom - whether it be the freedom to move or the freedom to stay home.