Moch, Leslie Page 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born 1944. Education: Attended Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland, 1964-65; University of Washington, B.A., 1966; Yale University, M.A.T., 1967; University of Michigan, Ph.D., 1979.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Michigan State University, Department of History, 301 Morrill Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824. E-mail—leslie@msu.edu.

CAREER:

University of Illinois, Urbana, department of sociology, visiting research associate, 1978-79, visiting lecturer, 1979-80; University of Texas at Arlington, department of history, assistant professor, 1980-84; University of Michigan, Flint, department of history, assistant professor, 1984-86, associate professor, 1986-93, professor and chair of department, 1993-96; Michigan State University, East Lansing, department of history, professor, 1996—, director of graduate studies and associate chair, 1998-2001. École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Paris, France, enseignant-chercheur, March, 2005.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow-in-residence, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Gary D. Stark) Essays on the Family and Historical Change, University of Texas at Arlington/Texas A & M University Press (College Station, TX), 1983.

Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-Century France, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1983.

Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1992, 2nd edition, 2003.

(Editor, with Dirk Hoerder) European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

(Editor, with Michael P. Hanagan and Wayne te Brake) Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1998.

(Editor, with Harvey J. Graff and Philip McMichael) Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2005.

Also contributor to encyclopedias, including The European Experience of Declining Fertility: The Quiet Revolution, 1850-1970, edited by J. Gillis, L. Tilly, and D. Levine, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1992; Encyclopedia of Social History, edited by Peter Stearns, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1994; Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry, edited by S. Greenhalgh, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1995; The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, edited by R. Cohen, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1995; Encarta Encyclopedia, Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), 1997; Migrations, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, edited by J. Lucassen and L. Lucassen, Peter Lang (Bern, Switzerland), 1997; European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective, 1850 to the Present, edited by J. Klausen and L.A. Tilly, Rowman & Littlefield (New York, NY), 1998; European Women's History: A Reader, edited by F. Montgomery, Routledge (London, England), 2001; Encyclopedia of European Social History, Macmillan (New York, NY), 2001; International Migration Research: Constructions, Omissions, and Promises of Interdisciplinarity, edited by E. Morawska and M. Bommes, Ashgate (London, England), 2005; and The Encyclopedia of Migration and Integration in Europe since the Early Modern Period, edited by Klaus Bade, Pieter Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jochen Oltmer, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2007. Contributor of articles to journals, including International Review of Social History, Social Science History, Continuity and Change, Quaderni Storici, Journal of Urban History, and French Historical Studies. Contributor of reviews to periodicals, including American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Journal of Economic History, Histoire Sociale/Social History, International Migration Review, Labor History, Annales de démographie historique, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, European History Quarterly, Journal of Family History, Social Science History, and International Labor and Working Class History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Social historian Leslie Page Moch specializes in the history of European migration—that is, the movement of populations within Europe, rather than from Europe to the Americas. Her works, including European Migrants: Global and Local Perspec-tives and Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, look at the ways in which European populations moved within the continent, sometimes crossing over political, social, and economic borders in order to further their interests. Moch's research in these and other venues makes clear the fact that Europeans were not bound to their homes before the advent of modern transportation systems like the train and the car. In fact, Europeans were a highly mobile people from at least the middle of the seventeenth century. "But while migration has been a constant," Carl J. Strikwerda wrote in a review of Moving Europeans published in the International Migration Review, "the form it has taken has shifted greatly several times over the last few centuries. In describing how economic, political, and social forces have produced these shifting patterns of migration, Moch has written a virtual synthesis of European social history."

Moch and other historians of migration patterns see these movements as falling into three major classifications: movements within a country, from the rural countryside to the city or from one rural area to another, usually in search of employment or better working conditions; refugee movement, usually as the result of war, unrest, or famine; and transnational movement (which includes not only migration from one European nation to another, but also immigration to colonies in the Americas, Asia, or Africa). In general, movement also followed historic patterns: from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, European migration was largely rural and local (within national boundaries). From about 1750 to 1815 (the initial period of industrialization) migration was largely from rural to urban settings. From 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to 1914, the outbreak of World War I, migration from countryside to the cities continued, but transnational migration also grew, as European colonies began to attract more and more immigrants. The twentieth century was marked by transnational migration, often in search of work. The late twentieth century, with its many small wars and struggles for independence in former colonies, saw a new and different trend: the arrival in Europe of colonial refugees, often people not of European origin. This trend in turn led to a new pattern in European politics: the attempt to limit the immigration of non-European peoples to the continent.

Each of these migrations both demonstrates and has an important impact on European political history. For instance, the beginning of the modern period in 1650 was marked by the end of the wars of religion in Europe—a struggle on a scale not to be seen again in the continent's history until the Napoleonic wars. Refugees from Germany, France, and other areas scarred by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) were scattered across the continent. In 1685, in one of the last acts of this drama, Louis XIV of France declared Protestantism illegal and expelled French Protestants from his domains. The result was that an estimated half million French fled the country for refuge in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, and overseas. The economic impact was enormous as well, for France as well as for the rest of Europe—France lost many of its best and brightest thinkers, who at the same time went on to spread some of the best French of culture and thinking across the world.

What makes Moch's work in general, and Moving Europeans in particular, so important, according to reviewers, is the fact that freedom of movement is central in understanding the social history of the continent. In Moving Europeans, according to reviewer Katherine A. Lynch in the Journal of Urban History, Moch points out that "migration has been a key to the landholding, inheritance, and family systems of Europe at least since the early modern period. For centuries, local migration involved primarily single women and men who left their homes temporarily or permanently to earn resources for their eventual marriage and/or to contribute to their resource-poor families of origin." "The fact that these patterns of "life-cycle" service lay at the foundation of fundamental patterns of inheritance and family patterns," Lynch continued, "has, however, been obscured by historians of the countryside who have focused on the study of places rather than people moving in and out of their study areas." "By focusing on migration as population movements to be counted, characterized, and patterned," declared James R. Lehning, writing for the Journal of Social History, "this book reflects the approaches of that literature and only marginally addresses other aspects of the topic such as the meaning of migration for those who traveled. But Moch has written a valuable survey that allows historians to move on to the next step." Moving Europeans "remains," concluded Russell King in a review for the Historian, "an impressive synthesis of the literature across many nations and across an equally challenging arc of time."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1994, Rudolph M. Bell, review of Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, p. 220.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, September, 1993, B. Osborne, review of Moving Europeans, p. 194; April, 1996, M. Curtis, review of European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, p. 1383; March, 2004, B. Osborne, review of Moving Europeans, p. 1361.

Contemporary Sociology, March, 2000, Steven Rytina, review of Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics, p. 402.

Economic History Review, May, 1994, Katrina Honeyman, review of Moving Europeans, p. 434.

English Historical Review, February, 1998, Panikos Panayi, review of European Migrants, p. 244.

European History Quarterly, January, 1994, John K. Walton, review of Moving Europeans, p. 175.

Historian, spring, 2006, Russell King, review of Moving Europeans.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, January, 1998, Raingard Esser, review of European Migrants, p. 102.

History Today, October, 1992, review of Moving Europeans, p. 56.

International Migration Review, summer, 1994, Carl J. Strikwerda, review of Moving Europeans.

Journal of American Studies, December, 1997, J.F. Lennon, review of European Migrants, p. 452.

Journal of Historical Geography, April, 1994, Charles W.J. Withers, review of Moving Europeans, p. 208.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, spring, 1995, review of Moving Europeans; summer, 2000, Maryjane Osa, review of Challenging Authority.

Journal of Modern History, March, 1996, Eric Richards, review of Moving Europeans, p. 167.

Journal of Social History, fall, 1994, James R. Lehning, review of Moving Europeans.

Journal of Urban History, May, 1997, Katherine A. Lynch, review of Moving Europeans, p. 460.

Library Journal, October 1, 1992, Daniel Liestman, review of Moving Europeans, p. 103.

Reviews in American History, March, 1997, David M. Reimers, review of European Migrants, p. 68.

ONLINE

History Department, Michigan State University Web site,http://www.history.msu.edu/ (May 1, 2008), "Leslie Moch."