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Migration in World History Course Homework

Tonight's Homework

Tonight's Homework was an annotation assignment on push factors. Migration studies is super interesting.

Later Homework

Later the class will read Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa and other Stories.

Jewish History Course Homework

Tonight's Homework

Tonight's Homework is Wiki 1, an activity on how to edit Wikipedia.

Later Homework

Later, the class will have to read The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews.

Wiki 5 Drafts

Religion and Divorce

Different religions have varied perceptions of divorce. Some religions accept divorce as a fact of life, while others only believe it is right under certain circumstances like adultery. Also, some religions allow remarriage after divorce, and others believe it is inherently wrong. This article attempts to summarize these viewpoints of major world religions and some important traditions regarding divorce in each faith.

Furthermore, from the philosophical and mystical point of view, divorce is a unique procedure of tremendous importance and complexity, because it nullifies the holiest of connections that can exist in the Universe (similar to a connection between a person and God). Because of the danger of the birth of illegitimate children (mamzerim) if the process is not performed properly, and because divorce law is extraordinarily complex, the process is generally supervised by experts.

One part of the complex process of divorce in Judaism, is the creation of the get itself. The get is crafted with great care and responsibility in order to ensure that no mistakes create consequences in the future. For example, exactly twelve lines are written in permanent ink telling the names of both parties, place, and time of the divorce.

In general, it is accepted that for a Jewish divorce to be effective the husband must hand to the wife, while witnesses observe, and not vice versa, a bill of divorcement, called a get. Although the get is mainly used as proof of the divorce, sometimes the wife will tear the get to signal the end of the marriage and to ensure it is not reused. However, from ancient times, the get was considered to be very important to show all those who needed to have proof that the woman was in fact free from the previous marriage and free to remarry. In Jewish law, besides other things, the consequences of a woman remarrying and having a child while still legally married to another is profound: the child would be a mamzer, to be avoided at any cost. Also, the woman would be committing adultery should she remarry while still legally married to another. An enactment called Herem de-Rabbenu Gershom (literally, the proscription of Rabbenu Gershom)--accepted universally throughout European Jewish communities—prohibited a husband from divorcing his wife against her will.

Jewish Wedding

Although the ketubah is the actual marriage document, in Conservative Judaism it also acts as a prenuptial agreement. The ketubah serves this function in Conservative Judaism in order to prevent husbands from refusing to give their wives a divorce. To do this, the ketubah has built in provisions where if predetermined circumstances occur, the divorce goes into effect immediately.

Jewish views on marriage

One of such efforts by some Conservative Jews is that they are beginning to build provisions into the ketubah where if predetermined circumstances occur, the divorce goes into effect immediately.

Dust Bowl

Human displacement

Between 1930 and 1940, approximately 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states. In just over a year, over 86,000 people migrated to California. This number is more than the number of migrants to that area during the 1849 Gold Rush. Migrants abandoned farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico, but were often generally referred to as "Okies", "Arkies", or "Texies". Terms such as "Okies" and "Arkies" came to be known in the 1930s as the standard terms for those who had lost everything and were struggling the most during the Great Depression.

A migratory family from Texas living in a trailer in an Arizona cotton field

However, not all migrants traveled long distances; most migrants participated in internal state migration moving from counties that the Dust Bowl highly impacted to other less affected counties. So many families left their farms and were on the move that the proportion between migrants and residents was nearly equal in the Great Plains states.

An examination of Census Bureau statistics and other records, and a 1939 survey of occupation by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics of about 116,000 families who arrived in California in the 1930s, showed that only 43 percent of southwesterners were doing farm work immediately before they migrated. Nearly one-third of all migrants were professional or white-collar workers. The poor economy displaced more than just farmers as refugees to California; many teachers, lawyers, and small business owners moved west with their families during this time. Specifically for farmers, while some of them had to take on unskilled labor when they moved, leaving the farming sector commonly led to greater social mobility in the future as there was a far greater likelihood that migrant farmers would go into semi-skilled or high-skilled fields which paid better. Non-farmers experienced more downward occupational moves than farmers, but in most cases they were not significant enough to bring them into poverty. This was due to the fact that it was mostly high-skilled migrants that experienced the downward shift into semi-skilled work. While semi-skilled work did not pay as well as high-skilled work, most of these workers were not impoverished. For the most part, by the end of the Dust Bowl the migrants generally were better off than those who chose to stay behind according to their occupational changes.

After the Great Depression ended, some migrants moved back to their original states. Many others remained where they had resettled. About one-eighth of California's population is of Okie heritage.

Changes in agriculture and population on the plains

Agricultural land and revenue boomed during World War I, but fell during the Great Depression and the 1930s. The agricultural land that was worst affected by the Dust Bowl was 16 million acres of land by the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. These twenty counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service identified as the worst wind-eroded region were home to the majority of the Great Plains migrants during the Dust Bowl.

While migration from and between the Southern Great Plain States was greater than migration in other regions in the 1930s, the numbers of migrants from these areas had only slightly increased from the 1920s. Thus, the Dust Bowl and Great Depression did not trigger a mass exodus of southern migrants, it simply encouraged these migrants to keep moving where in other areas the Great Depression limited mobility due to economic issues, decreasing migration. While the population of the Great Plains did fall during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the drop was not caused by extreme numbers of migrants leaving the Great Plains but because of a lack of migrants moving from outside of the Great Plains into the region.