Hot Baby Names for 1710, Continued

I've compiled the name data from the Boston Birth Records for the years 1710-1715 in order to get a better picture of the popularity of given names as mentioned in my earlier post. I have a much larger sample this time: 818 girls and 885 boys.

Top 25 Names in Boston, 1710-1715

Land Use Workshop

I know it's probably a bit late to mention this, but there is a workshop called "People and the Land in the Atlantic World 1500-1825" on Saturday at Lamont Library. It's free, but requires preregistration (available here).

Bernard Bailyn is giving the opening remarks. I'll admit - part of the reason I'm going is just to see him. I hear that he's around campus, but I wouldn't recognize him, so this is my chance to remedy that situation. Rumor on campus is that Bailyn has, on at least one occasion, shown up to a random senior's thesis presentation and asked intimidating questions. I would cry.

John White watercolor via. Incidentally, this watercolor is currently on display at Yale's Center for British Art. I took my mom and sister to the exhibit back in March, and it is worth a visit. The pictures are striking in person - copies in books can't reproduce the iridescence of White's fish or the erasure marks around his dancing Native Americans. The exhibit is up until June 1st. Go see it if you can!

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction

Pete found an online seal generator, so from now on, I will be able to bestow a snappy image, as well as my gratitude, on any academic text that makes its point in fewer than 250 pages.

Today's recipient: Bernard Bailyn's The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986). This slim volume provides a basic overview of the questions driving historians' investigations into European migration to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Bailyn is mostly concerned with migration from Britain, but also includes discussion of Germans who ended up in British North America.

Bailyn builds his argument on four propositions:

• First, transatlantic migration was an outgrowth of a culture of internal migration that characterized early modern Britain.
• Second, migration was not a single, unified process, but a combination of distinct, independent migrations.
• Third, after the earliest phases of migration, subsequent emigrants crossed the ocean in order to fill the demand for (increasingly skilled) labor and to speculate in land.
• Fourth, American culture is best understood as a backward-looking outpost of European culture, not as a forward-looking frontier.

With these points, Bailyn situates himself directly at the center of the prevailing historiography of 20 years ago. For the historians of the 1970s and 1980s, migration could be explained mostly in economic terms as a story of unemployed Englishmen, labor demand, and the free movement of free and temporarily unfree people to a land of opportunity.

Today, the scholarship is tending toward an emphasis on the coercive elements of migration. David Eltis, among others, has redirected the historiographical narrative to place involuntary migration at the center and to treat voluntary migration as the exceptional story in transatlantic migration history.