Immigration and Urbanization Webquest
Introduction - Task - Process - Resources - Evaluation - Conclusion
Introduction:
Emigrant - a person who leaves his or her homeland to move someplace else Immigrant – a person who comes to a new place (that he or she was not born in) to live there ********************************************************************************* Reading from American Voices From A Century of Immigration 1820 – 1924 But the views of Americans are only half of the story of immigration. Equally vital are the motives, thoughts, and experiences of the emigrants who left their homelands to come to the United States. People emigrated for many reasons. Many who came during the century of immigration, like many who had come to the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were driven by economic factors. Quite simply, they wanted a better life for themselves and their children than they could have in their homelands, and they believed they could find it in America. That dream often took the form of owning land. In some countries, such as Norway, there was simply no more farmland available. In others, such as England, prosperous landowners owned or were buying up all the land, reducing peasant farmers to tenants or hired laborers. Some emigrants hoped to earn better wages in American’s growing cities than they could earn at home. Others were lured by tales of the country’s rich natural resources, from waters teeming with fish to soil so rich it barely needed to be tilled to western mountains full of gold. Emigrants also came to the United States in search of political or religious freedom. Many Europeans yearned to live in a democracy, especially after the failure of widespread revolutionary movements that had tried to bring democracy to Europe in the 1840s. Others, such as the Jews who left Eastern Europe and Russia, wanted to escape religious or ethnic persecution. Many people emigrated for more than one reason, or simply because they felt that they would have a brighter future in the new country across the sea. Some emigrants were pulled to America, drawn by dreams of improved fortunes or new freedoms. Others were pushed out of their homelands by hostile circumstances. A plant disease destroyed Ireland’s potato crop between 1845 and 1849, for example, dooming many Irish to starvation and causing thousands more to emigrate. The Taiping Rebellion that began in southern China in the 1850s brought chaos and desperate poverty – turbulent conditions that drove many Chinese to emigrate to California. ********************************************************************************* By completing the following activities you will learn about some of these experiences and why the United States is called "Nations of all Nations". No single place is more responsible for making the United States the most diverse multicultural mosaic in the world than Ellis Island. |