¹ Thernstrom, Stephan, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973), pp. 220–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an excellent summary of the results of existing mobility studies and provides the only attempt at a comparative analysis of the existing studies.

² Vinyard, Jo Ellen, “Inland Urban Immigrants: The Detroit Irish, 1850,” Michigan History, 57 (Summer, 1973), 121–39Google Scholar; Higgs, Robert, “Participation of Blacks and Immigrants in the American Merchant Class, 1890–1910: Some Demographic Relations,” Explorations in Economic History, 13 (Apr. 1976), 153–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ingham, John N., “Rags to Riches Revisited: The Effect of City Size and Related Factors on the Recruitment of Business Leaders,” Journal of American History, 63 (Dec. 1976), 615–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, P. M. G., “The Social Origins of American Leaders: The Demographic Foundations,” Perspectives in American History, 3 (1969), 159–344Google Scholar.

³ The importance of structural factors is emphasized in Jackson, Elton F. and Crockett, Harry J., “Occupational Mobility in the United States: A Point Estimate and Trend Comparison,” American Sociological Review, 29 (Feb. 1964), 5–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blau, Peter M. and Duncan, Otis Dudley, The American Occupational Structure (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Boudon, Raymond, Mathematical Structures of Social Mobility (San Francisco, 1973)Google Scholar; and Hauser, Robert M., Koffel, John N., Travis, Harry P. and Dickinson, Peter J., “Temporal Change in Occupational Mobility: Evidence for Men in the United States,” American Sociological Review, 40 (June, 1975), 279–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ Although many other studies exist, their data are not in a form comparable to those included in this study.

⁵ The data for Holland include only the Dutch born; other foreign born comprised 0.9, 2.5, 4.7 and 5.9 percent and the Dutch born 97.3, 92.2, 83.3 and 61.8 percent of the labor force in 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 respectively.

⁶ For a discussion of the literature questioning the use of occupation as an indicator of social mobility see Westoff, Charles F., Bressler, Marvin and Sagi, Phillip C., “The Concept of Social Mobility: An Empirical Inquiry,” American Sociological Review, 25 (June, 1960), 378–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katz, Michael B., “Occupational Classification in History,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (Summer, 1972), 63–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Clyde, “Occupational Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Social History, 5 (Spring, 1972), 310–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Gordon W. Kirk, Jr., The Promise of American Life: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century Immigrant Community, Holland, Michigan, 1847–1894 (American Philosophical Society, Memoirs series, forthcoming).

⁸ Originally a North Central vs. non-North Central dummy variable was included. However, its simple correlation with mobility is lower (r = .54) than that between Northeast and mobility (r = −.63). Since there is only one southern case, the two variables measure the same dimension to a great extent. For this reason, the more powerful Northeast is used in the analysis and North Central is dropped from consideration. No dummy variable was used for South because there is only one southern case.

⁹ See Jackson and Crockett, pp. 5–15, for an explanation of this measurement. Although structural change measured on the basis of the entire labor force would be a better measure than ours, since the former includes the effects of migration and net natural processes on the labor force while ours is based only on those appearing in a mobility matrix, data on the entire labor force are not available for the vast majority of the existing community mobility studies. Moreover, there is justification for using our measurement. Both seem to be highly interrelated; in Holland both moved in the same direction from decade to decade.