diasporas and disaster
after winning my guest gridskipper post, I thought it might be wise to actually read the site a little more often than I do (I usually head straight to the LA section when I do). and I'm glad I did today - there's an interesting post about katrina causing the largest diaspora in american history. fascinating to see how concentrated the displacement is (not suprisingly). epodunk provides a graphical representation of just where katrina survivors are heading.
posted by marissa @ 5:27 PM
1 Comments:
good post. However, it all depends on how you look at the numbers and define "largest permanent diaspora" in American History. I would argue that the Great Migration of blacks from the South from 1910-1920 is much larger in terms of numbers--the number is about 300,000 to 1 million. Is it ironic or appropriate the the largest number of displaced people are again of African American heritage. I don't mean to play the race card (or as we used to call it in the 80s "Mau Mauing", but it's curious that epodunk.com didn't even list the Great Migration on its sidebar histories.
If epodunk.com is more precise in its wording, i'd agree that the Gulf Coast diaspora is the largest moved in a short period of time, e.g. 4 weeks. Plus, it remains to be seen if this migration is a permanent one. I suspect many people will return and resettle. Plus, the methodology of ePodunk is kinda suspect. Analyzing "safe lists" on the Internet isn't really a good method for analysis...
Adrienne, labrainterrain
Post a Comment
<< Home