SECTION 2: Three Geographies of the Pale of Settlement
Chapter 2: The Physical Geography of the Pale
Chapter 3: The Human Geography of the Pale
Chapter 4: Individual Settlements are Members of Discrete Settlement Systems
SECTION 3: Order and Disorder in Everyday Lives
Chapter 5: Ordered Life in Individual Shtetlach, Towns and Cities
Chapter 6: Ordered Life in the Immediate Built and Social Environments
Chapter 7: The Changing Order in the World of Work
Chapter 8: Order and Disorder in Jewish Marriages, Families and Kinship
SECTION 4: Tracking Responses to Disorder
Chapter 9: Nineteenth-Century Disorder in the Pale and Elsewhere
SECTION 5: New Histories
Chapter 10: A Research Agenda for New Historians
Before his US Foreign Service career, Robert E. Mitchell directed social science research centers and was a professor of urban and regional planning. In addition to his two recent books on the history of economic thought, he published articles on a wide range of development-related topics.
This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies, questions, theories and analytical methods of human geography, economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the immediate built environment, the book explores how both physical and human space influenced responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.