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Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations in human history, irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind. In this grondbreaking study, Tara Zahra explores the deeper story of this astonishing movement of people - one of the largest in human history. As villages emptied and the fear of depopulation ran rampant, anxiety over "American fever" existed alongside the promise of a brighter social and economic future. On both sides of the ocean lives were transformed by these decades of mass departure.

In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. 'Law of the Journey' consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals: Franz Kafka and Václav Havel. A few isolated rubber tubes floated on the concrete floor next to the raft, with rubber humans reaching out to be saved. The exhibit conveyed both the desperation of the migrants and the inadequacy of the response.

"Going West" explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

RésuméÀ partir du cas de la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre, cet article démontre la centralité des enfants dans l'histoire de la purification ethnique. Pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les enfants devinrent à la fois des dépouilles de guerre et la cible de campagnes visant à créer des états-nations homogènes en Europe. Entre 1945 et 1948, trois millions d'Allemands tchécoslovaques furent expulsés de Tchécoslovaquie, alors que cet état lançait à travers le continent une recherche des « enfants perdus » kidnappés ou déportés par les nazis. Les deux processus se compliquèrent du cas des milliers d'enfants de couples tchécoallemands, qui força les autorités à choisir entre deux buts nationalistes concurrents : l'ambition d'effacer à court terme toute trace de germanité en Tchécoslovaquie, et la volonté à plus long terme d'une croissance démographique. Alors que le populationnisme triomphait dans les ministères à Prague, il fut souvent tenu en échec dans la pratique locale. Ces débats illustrent l'importance des enfants non seulement dans l'histoire des politiques de population et de migration dans l'Europe du XXe siècle, mais aussi dans tous les processus de la reconstruction d'après-guerre.

In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: "One of the greatest tragedies of all times is the separation of families in Europe today: wives in one country, husbands in another, with no possibility of reunion and often no means of communication; babies who have never seen their fathers; scattered fragments of families not knowing if their loved ones are living or dead, and often without hope of ever seeing them again. There are multitudes of wretched souls for whom it seems the sun of hope has set."

Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated with historicizing indifference, and examines the intersections between national indifference and transnational history. Making indifference visible enables historians to better understand the limits of nationalization and thereby helps to challenge the nationalist narratives and categories that have traditionally dominated the historiography of eastern Europe.

AbstractIn the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called 'minority problem' loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. It suggests that even as east/west binaries structured the unequal application of new international minority rights protections, France, rather than Czechoslovakia, implemented a more radical and racist policy of forcible national classification.