100 Books Like Settlers

What I love most about this book is the focus on women. That sounds really obvious, given the title, but it’s unusual. Male migrants are so easy to find in historical sources. On shipping lists, women and children were often only recorded as ‘wife and 5 children’ of a named man.

Due to this bias in the primary sources, men are usually at the center of 19th-century migration literature. Their experience is taken as the norm. Their motivations are assumed to be the ones guiding the migration. So I really love that this spotlight on women highlights the experiences and importance of these migrants to New Zealand and also that it has forced historians who have come after this publication to try harder to include women in their migration stories, too. 

There is a lot to love about this book. The level of detail about every element of Scottish ethnicity under consideration is extraordinary. Bueltmann seems to leave no stone unturned in her examination of Scottish associations. I am always a big fan of historical databases, so the analysis based on the database compiled for this research of society members, based on extant sources, is a big selling point for me.

Many society membership lists have been lost to history, and the New Zealand census returns were systematically destroyed, so compiling such a database was no mean feat. What has always most strongly stuck with me, though, is how the stories of individual migrants are woven throughout, not just thrown in as examples but integral to understanding the phenomena she is exploring. John Jack and family, for example, turn up at different points in their lives at different points in the… show more.

I love that this book tells a bleak migration story–the stories of those for whom migration was the beginning of a period of struggle. The most often told migration stories are the successful ones. The migrants who arrived in their new land and excelled–built a business empire, became prime minister, bought up huge swathes of land, and passed their wealth onto their descendants. Even at the time, letters home to family who stayed behind seldom spoke of hardship or difficulties.

Taking lunatic asylum records as its core source, this book allows this other end of the settler experience spectrum to be examined through an institutional lens that is perhaps less widely consulted than it deserves to be.

What I love most about this book is its challenge for New Zealand historians to examine the role of different British cultures in shaping New Zealand society. Akenson, a Canadian author, took a one-year research fellowship in New Zealand, and this resulting book has changed the face of migration studies in New Zealand in the decades since.

He describes previous works as cementing a tradition of biculturalism, ‘lumping… all white settlers into a spurious unity’, but more than just laying down the challenge to do something about that ‘lumping,’ he then shows a way forward, examining the Irish in New Zealand. Marvellous!

I love this story because, for me, it’s a perfect example of why a ship is such a great platform for storytelling, a moving stage for a compelling cast of characters to act out the drama of their past and present lives while heading into an uncertain future.

The Star of the Sea is a "coffin ship," the name given to the leaking hulks that transported a million emigrants from Ireland to America during the Great Famine of the 1840s.

It’s a historical novel but for me, a timeless story about emigration and the human condition, of refugees fleeing the monsters of their past, war, famine, disease, whatever, into what they hope will be a brighter future, and of what happens to them on the way.

Ireland is one of my favorite locations for novels, as well as New York City, and this one toggles between both. It’s the story of a young girl in a small town with no opportunity who travels to find a place where she can thrive. It’s a story we’ve heard many times before, and yet it never gets old.

I was drawn to the aspects of this novel that uncover the realities of the 1950s from the perspective of a young, female immigrant with no resources. It deals with survival in a totally different way than the books I listed above. There’s an intensity and reality to it that is profound.

I love primary sources and histories that reproduce them. Here is another amazing feat of historical detection. “Details have been taken from eye-witness accounts; original Certificates of Registration, paintings, and contemporary lithograph drawings have been reproduced,” may sound dry but this book is alive with the voices of immigrants telling both tragic and triumphant tales. Anyone whose Irish ancestors came to North America between 1846 and 1851 will want to examine the numerous passenger lists that Laxton includes. I think of this book and all it taught me when I visit my hometown and stop by the monument commemorating Irish immigrants on the shore of Lake Ontario.

The story begins with a mystery and then we are taken back to Dublin, Ireland, to the character’s childhood. He comes to Ellis Island alone and is taken in by an Italian family. The immigrant experience is compelling in this novel and I love a story where you go back in time to try to figure out how the character got to the place he’s in and what happened on his journey. This is a page-turner for sure.

I don’t know how much I knew of nineteenth-century Ireland when I first read this book as a child, but I certainly wanted to know a whole lot more after reading it. And after years of researching and teaching nineteenth-century Irish history, I still love this book!

This is a wonderfully written and extremely moving account of Irish emigration to the US in the nineteenth century, as told by (fictional) teenager Peggy O’Driscoll. It is the second in a trilogy, which includes the more well-known Under the Hawthorn Tree about the Great Irish Famine. I love them all, but this one was always my favorite, following the challenges and adventures that Peggy had in the ‘new world.’

I love how this book explores the role of faith in supporting migrants as they confront the challenges of crossing the border and beginning a life without legal status in America. While describing many of the challenges that migrants face in an unflinching way, the book nonetheless maintains focus on their faith in a larger purpose and their hope for a promising future for their families.

Their capacity for and approaches to remaining hopeful inspire me as I face similar doubts despite a much more stable life situation.