The Dust Bowl migration of the Great Depression has been immortalized in American culture though pieces of literature like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The movement began because the extremely harsh and arid climate of the 1930s, combined with the loss of jobs caused by the Great Depression, meant that many farmers in America’s Great Plains and Midwest states were no longer able to sustain themselves. They migrated, with their families, en masse to the west coast. Because this migration was caused by an environmental disaster it is known as an “eco-migration.”

The former British colony of Australia has an interesting and somewhat unique early history compared to other British colonies. After the abolition of slave labor in the British Empire, the British began to send convicted criminals to Australia in a forced resettlement. Conditions were harsh for the convicts and their lives often shared many similarities with the lives of slaves. It is worth noting that when the Europeans arrived in Australia they did not find a deserted continent devoid of human life. There, as most everywhere else, they encountered native people (in Australia usually called Aboriginals) and violently suppressed them.

The Pilgrims who migrated to America in the early seventeenth century did so in order to escape religious persecution in Europe. They were motivated by reasons of political repression and a desire for personal freedom.

The first inhabitants of North America crossed over a land bridge from Asia into North America approximately fifteen thousand years ago. Having arrived in the new continent it took little more than two thousand years before the descendants of these new arrivals had spread across the whole of the Americas.

By 1998, the Croats had successfully found independence from their Serb occupiers. What's important here is that 1) Croats are a unique nationality, 2) Serbs are a unique nationality, and 3) the Muslims throughout the region are considered a nationality too. Following the Croatian victory, many ethnic Serbs living in Croatia did not want to be governed by the new Croats' government. So nearly thousands of ethnic Serbs fled Croatia for their “homeland” of Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Remember that Yugoslavia soon after devolved into Serbia-Montenegro, and the dictator Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power by his people.

The Roma people arrived in Europe some time in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. They migrated from some place in the East, probably over several generations, with the most commonly suspected point of origin being somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. Like the Jewish people who were already well dispersed around Europe the Roma did not assimilate smoothly into the countries they emigrated to. They retained their social customs and religious beliefs and were distrusted by large sections of the local population. For much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were officially persecuted and banished by many of the societies of Europe and forced to migrate endlessly around Europe. State persecution of the Roma continues to this day in many countries.

For many years, industrial centers in the midwest like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland were home to booming economies and burgeoning populations; however, as American industry began to decline as a global force in the second half of the twentieth century, there were far fewer jobs available. This led many Americans to migrate south and west in search of greater economic opportunity and better weather. The region they left behind became known as the “Rust Belt” to reflect how the heavy machinery was going to rust due to disuse.

Great Britain's North American Colonies saw a wide variety of people take the opportunity to settle America's Atlantic coast. Due to the wide variety of colonies and locations from which people came, the reasons for traveling to the New World ran the gamut from political and religious reasons to simple economic necessity and serving punishment in the colonies. Almost all of the colonists were middle or lower class individuals seeking a better life, rather than individuals trying to get rich quickly.

The Boers were settlers who arrived in what is now called South Africa in the seventeenth century. They came, almost exclusively, from the Netherlands - although some were Huguenots from France and other European countries.

As Americans, we tend to primarily associate the Atlantic Slave Trade with the arrival of enslaved Africans into English colonies in North America; however, this represented a relatively small proportion of the slave trade at the time. The plantations of Brazil, and to a slightly lesser extent, the Caribbean, were the most common destinations for slaves. By some estimates, more than ten million slaves arrived in Brazil during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.