Itinerario, Vol. 45, No. 2, 279–303. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0165115321000164 From the United States to Rural Europe: The New Immigration, Homecoming Migrants, and Social Remittances in Hungary BÁLINT VARGA* E-mail:
[email protected] A high number of migrants returned from their transatlantic sojourn to their native Hungary between the 1880s and the 1930s. Despite being pauperised and marginalised in the United States, they encountered norms and mechanisms of a democratic society and cultural patterns unknown to the rural society they hailed from. Upon returning, they implemented some of these practices. The paper investigates the durability of this cultural change and argues that the transatlantic transmission of norms was outweighed in significance by internal, regional movements. Keywords: transatlantic migration, social remittances, cultural change, Americanisation, democratisation, Hungary, Czechoslovakia Somewhere in provincial Hungary in the early 1900s, a district sheriff slapped a man who had approached him with a petty issue. The sheriff’s outrage was caused by the impertinent behaviour of the applicant: he addressed the sheriff politely by taking off his cap but, instead of remaining discovert, he continued his plea while replacing the cap—a shameless act in the eyes of the sheriff, crying for immediate response in the form of physical assault.