Ethnic history is a branch of social history that studies ethnic groups and immigrants. Barman (2007) argues that the field allows historians to use alternate models of interpretation, unite qualitative and quantitative data, apply sociological models to historical patterns, examine more deeply macro-level policies and decisions, and, especially, empathize with the ethnic groups under study.
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Defining the field
Ethnic history is especially important in the U.S. and Canada. Oscar Handlin (b. 1915), the director of scores of PhD dissertations at Harvard University was an important pioneer and sponsor of ethnic historiography. Handlin's Pulitzer-prize-winning interpretation, The Uprooted (1951) was highly influential.
Major encyclopedias have helped define the field; Handler sponsored one published by Harvard University Press in 1980 that received wide media attention because it tied in with an American interest in their roots.
Perin (1983) looks at the historiography of Canadian ethnic history and finds two alternative methodologies. One is more static and emphasizes how closely immigrant cultures replicate the Old World. This approach tends to be filiopietistic. The alternative approach has been influenced by the recent historiography on labor, urban, and family history. It sees the immigrant community as an essentially North American phenomenon and integrates it into the mainstream of Canadian culture.
McDonald (2007) identifies five main areas of interest for scholarship on U.S. ethnic history: the origins and meaning of ethnicity, particularly the issue of whether it is inherited or invented; the origins of ethnic diversity (such as conquest, immigration, involuntary migration); models of ethnic adaptation (especially the Melting Pot, mosaic, salad bowl and kaleidoscope metaphors); ethnic incorporation into the social, economic, and political fabric of the receiving country; and minority group survival strategies, including responses to competing forms of allegiance like class and gender.
Much research is done by reading the letters immigrants wrote to relatives back home, often comparing the advantages and disadvantages of their new lives.
A significant trend has been to integrate ethnic history with other new historiographical tendencies, such as Atlantic history, labor history or women's history.
Organizations
The Immigration and Ethnic History Society was formed in 1965 and publishes a journal for libraries and its 829 members.