Historical Migration Quotes

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

...the Idumeans (Edomites) were...made Jews...and a Turkish people (Khazars) were mainly Jews in South Russia...The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.

Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.

My family left Afghanistan in 1976, well before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion. We certainly thought we would be going back. But when we saw those Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan, the prospect for return looked very dim. Few of us, I have to say, envisioned that nearly a quarter century of bloodletting would follow.

Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians and Irish, the Chinese and Japanese - everything you learned in sixth grade social studies about the great American melting pot.

The history of America is the history of families moving.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

Scientists say that Texas and Antarctica were connected at one time. In fact, early Mexicans used to go through Texas to try to sneak into Antarctica.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

A few scattered accounts, collected and combined together, may lead us to two certain conclusions: 1. That all the American Indians are one kind of people; 2. That they are the same as the people in the northeast of Asia.

The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First.

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

I was stunned to learn that more than 200,000 abandoned, neglected, or orphaned children had been sent from the East Coast to the Midwest on trains between 1854 and 1929.

If you look at the movement of refugees, in Vladimir Lenin's phrase, "the people who voted with their feet," the movement of refugees until comparatively modern times was overwhelmingly from West to East, not from East to West. Refugees of all kinds were constantly fleeing from Christendom to the Islamic lands. Jews of course and Muslims of course, but even some Christians and the movement of refugees went overwhelmingly that way.

The Mexico - United States border was always porous. People have been going and coming back since before the Spaniards arrived. Now we're seeing communities who have family members on the other side very frightened. I feel saddened for those families divided by violence. The whole border area is under siege.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

The Germans at first regard the crusaders as madmen … Consequently the many legions of horsemen who passed through their land [largely French], the hosts of people on foot, the crowds of country people, women and children, were viewed by them with contempt as persons who had altogether lost their wits.

The Great Body of the present People of Ireland are the Progeny of the English And Britains [Britons] that from time to time have come over into this kingdom; and there remains but a mere handful of the Ancient Irish at this day, I may say, not one in a thousand.

The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live.

With every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia,, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.

Up in the north of Scotland, a lot of the villages are completely Viking names. A lot of Vikings came down and settled in Scotland and in Ireland. And a lot of them didn't, but they took plenty of us with them - mostly the chicks.

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.

Iceland is 50 percent Celtic blood, from the females that they stole from us, which is why our country has only got dogs left. It was a joke! I'll never be let back in Scotland again!