A Great Many Refugees: Progressive Era Assistance in the American West

Local communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly addressed the needs of refugees, defined broadly during the Progressive Era to include internally displaced people and economic migrants. These communities’ efforts to assist people in need created a type of informal pop-up welfare system of short-term assistance that provided for hundreds, and often thousands of refugees.

In A Great Many Refugees Thomas A. Krainz examines how communities in the American West ca...