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    A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924
    A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924
    A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924

    By Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier

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    About this ebook

    History is dramatic—and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in a compelling series aimed at young readers. Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation. A Century of Immigration reviews the century of 1820 through 1920, in which there were two waves of immigration to the United States. This book discusses the varied motivations and nationalities of these new Americans, as well as the effects of mass immigration on the country as a whole, and the rise of antiforeign sentiments among more recent immigrants.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Publishing
    Release dateSep 2, 2013
    ISBN9781620645192
    A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924
    Author

    Christopher Collier

    Christopher Collier is an author and historian. He attended Clark University and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD. He was the official Connecticut State Historian from 1984 to 2004 and is now professor of history emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the brother of James Lincoln Collier, with whom he has written a number of novels, most of which are based on historic events. His books have been nominated for several awards, including the Newbery Honor and the Pulitzer Prize.

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      A Century of Immigration - Christopher Collier

      SERIES

      PREFACE

      OVER MANY YEARS of both teaching and writing for students at all levels, from grammar school to graduate school, it has been borne in on us that many, if not most, American history textbooks suffer from trying to include everything of any moment in the history of the nation. Students become lost in a swamp of factual information, and as a consequence lose track of how those facts fit together and why they are significant and relevant to the world today.

      In this series, our effort has been to strip the vast amount of available detail down to a central core. Our aim is to draw in bold strokes, providing enough information, but no more than is necessary, to bring out the basic themes of the American story, and what they mean to us now. We believe that it is surely more important for students to grasp the underlying concepts and ideas that emerge from the movement of history, than to memorize an array of facts and figures.

      The difference between this series and many standard texts lies in what has been left out. We are convinced that students will better remember the important themes if they are not buried under a heap of names, dates, and places.

      In this sense, our primary goal is what might be called citizenship education. We think it is critically important for America as a nation and Americans as individuals to understand the origins and workings of the public institutions that are central to American society. We have asked ourselves again and again what is most important for citizens of our democracy to know so they can most effectively make the system work for them and the nation. For this reason, we have focused on political and institutional history, leaving social and cultural history less well developed.

      This series is divided into volumes that move chronologically through the American story. Each is built around a single topic, such as the Pilgrims, the Constitutional Convention, or immigration. Each volume has been written so that it can stand alone, for students who wish to research a given topic. As a consequence, in many cases material from previous volumes is repeated, usually in abbreviated form, to set the topic in its historical context. That is to say, students of the Constitutional Convention must be given some idea of relations with England, and why the Revolution was fought, even though the material was covered in detail in a previous volume. Readers should find that each volume tells an entire story that can be read with or without reference to other volumes.

      Despite our belief that it is of the first importance to outline sharply basic concepts and generalizations, we have not neglected the great dramas of American history. The stories that will hold the attention of students are here, and we believe they will help the concepts they illustrate to stick in their minds. We think, for example, that knowing of Abraham Baldwin's brave and dramatic decision to vote with the small states at the Constitutional Convention will bring alive the Connecticut Compromise, out of which grew the American Senate.

      Each of these volumes has been read by esteemed specialists in its particular topic; we have benefited from their comments.

      CHAPTER I: A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS

      IT IS A truism to say that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The first English settlers, the ones who came in the 1600s, were, in a sense, immigrants. Just like millions of later immigrants, they had come to America to escape from autocratic governments, to find religious freedom, and to develop a more prosperous and satisfying life than they had had at home. It is true that some of the early arrivals, to Georgia, for instance, were petty criminals, beggars, and orphans sent by a British government who wanted to get rid of them. But the majority—not counting kidnapped Africans brought as slaves—were ordinary people who hoped to find in the New World comfortable livings, perhaps even riches, that they could not get in the British Isles.

      So, through the 1600s and 1700s, immigrants from many countries came in a steady stream—a stream that shrunk and swelled as it went along, but never stopped running. Most of these first immigrants came from the British Isles—England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. An especially large number of Scotch-Irish came in the late 1700s. (The Scotch-Irish were not Celtic Irish, nor were they Catholic; they were Scotsmen brought to Ireland by British overlords in the early seventeenth century.) But there were always people coming from other places, too. In 1790, when the first federal census was taken, there were 100,000 people with Dutch ancestors in the country, most of them in or around New York City, originally settled by the Dutch and a Dutch possession until 1664. There were over 75,000 Germans, the majority in Pennsylvania, with others scattered elsewhere. There were 14,000 French Huguenots, who had fled religious persecution at home, and pockets of many other nationalities everywhere. And beyond these voluntary immigrants were a very large number of involuntary ones—blacks imported as slaves from Africa and the Caribbean Islands.

      All Americans initially came to the New World from somewhere else. This reenactment, staged at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, shows English settlers in a military drill.

      America, thus, has always had its immigrants. But the great waves of immigration that began in about 1820, and went on for a hundred years, dwarfed anything that had gone before. It is these people we tend to think of when we use the word immigrant.

      Historians have usually divided the great immigration of this period into two phases: the old immigration of about 1820 to 1880 (with the Civil War, which drastically slowed immigration, coming in the 1860s) and the new immigration of 1880 to 1920. Today we are seeing an even newer phase of immigration, from about 1970 to the present. It is probably better, then, to abandon the terms old and new and speak rather of first and second waves of immigration in the nineteenth century, with the current one called a third wave.

      The first two waves differed mainly in the lands the immigrants came from. The first wave consisted of people from Ireland and Germany, but always with the largest number from England and Scotland, a majority of whom were

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