Coming to America: as the United States entered its second century, it became a haven for the largest wave of immigrants the world had ever seen.

During America's first 100 years, the majority of its immigrants were from the English-speaking countries of Europe or from Germany. By the mid-19th century, a new group of people began to arrive. Many were fleeing ethnic persecution or simply looking for a new life. Mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, the new immigrants swelled the big cities and worked the factories of the growing country. Between 1880 and 1921, nearly 25 million people legally immigrated to the United States. More than 12 million of them passed through the immigration reception center at Ellis Island, in New York Harbor. No country had ever absorbed so many people so quickly. Here are just a few of the stories of this great migration, in the immigrants' own words.

Teeming New York

FANNIE KLIGERMAN was 13 in 1903 when her family fled from the pogroms of southern Russia. Here she describes their trip across the Atlantic Ocean and through Ellis Island. Like many generations of immigrants before and after them, the Kligermans found themselves on the teeming streets of New York City's Lower East Side.

I was 13 years old and had to carry a baby. We sailed from Germany, and [seawater seeped] in the boat, and all the children got measles. Some of them died, and they threw them into the water like cattle. It was something that I will never forget.

[Ellis Island] was just like a prison. They threw us around. [The Kligermans were held there when the authorities suspected disease.] The worst thing was, you wouldn't guess! Every morning they came around to delouse [remove lice from] us. Our things were taken off, we were naked to be deloused.

Everybody was sad there. Oh, did I cry. There's more tears in Ellis Island to 10 people than to 100 people elsewhere.

By May, we found three rooms [on the Lower East Side]. You can imagine the 10 of us there. [A neighbor offered Fannie a job.] My mother said, "She can't work. She is only 13." The woman said, "Nobody will ever know. I bring in the collars from my son's factory. She'll turn them over, and she'll get two dollars a week." So I turned over and matched collars [to shirts]. When I came home on Friday with the two dollars, I thought I was the richest one.

So we had struggled--it was very, very hard. But we liked it, and we made it all right.

A Life in the Mills

Born on the Italian island of Sicily in 1902, PHILIP BONACORSI immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1904. They headed to Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the towns along the Merrimac River where immigrant families settled to work in textile mills, It was in the New England mill towns that some of the worst child-labor abuses of the Industrial Revolution occurred.

Everybody lived close [in Lawrence's Italian community]. Kids died of diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis. In them days they were poor, but believe me, they understood each other. They were friendly to each other; one had a problem, they all felt it.

I started work when I was 11 1/2 years old, at the Wood Worsted Mill, which was the biggest mill. I was an oiler boy, oiling up the machines. [The conditions in the mills were awful.] Lighting wasn't as good as it is today, of course, and the ventilation was terrible.

I seen some get hurt [by the machines]. I saw one girl, a Syrian girl, combing her hair. In them days you had five minutes to go and wash before quitting time, and that's it. They used to allow lunchtime, 10 minutes, but you had to eat it on the fly. You'd eat it while you're working. Well, this girl was combing her hair. She was in the spinning room with the wheels, and they caught her hair. It tore her scalp right off. And I saw a fellow at the Print Works lose that much of a finger.

The mills closed in 1952. Lawrence was already dead. It was the best thing that ever happened.

Words to Know

* diphtheria: a contagious bacterial disease that usually affects the tonsils, throat, nose, and/or skin.

* migration: a movement of persons from one place to another.

* pogrom: an organized persecution of an ethnic group.

From Canton to Chinatown

In the saga of the American West, Chinese immigrants played a large and often unsung role. Lee Chew migrated from Canton, a city in southern China, to San Francisco in 1880. He was one of many thousands of Chinese who came to work on the railroads or in the mining camps. In places like San Francisco's Chinatown, the Chinese created a unique American subculture.

When I first opened a laundry it was in company with a partner. We went to a town about 500 miles inland [from San Francisco], where a railroad was building. We had to put up with many insults and some frauds. When the railroad construction gang moved on, we went with them. The men were rough and prejudiced against us, but not more so than in the big Eastern cities.

We were three years with the railroad, and then went to the mines, where we made plenty of money in gold dust. But we had a hard time. Many of the miners were wild men who carried revolvers and after drinking would come into our place to shoot and steal shirts. One of these men hit his head hard against a flat iron, and all the miners came and broke up our laundry, chasing us out of town. They were going to hang us.

Americans are not all bad, nor are they wicked wizards. Still, they have their faults, and their treatment of us is outrageous. More than half the Chinese in this country would become citizens if allowed to do so, and would be patriotic Americans. All Congressmen acknowledge the injustice of the treatment of my people, yet they continue it.

Feeling Like an American

Another important influx of new Americans came from the countries of far northern Europe-Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Many of them settled in the upper Great Plains and Great Lakes states, which were much like their homelands. Peter Kekonnen was 16 when he arrived in 1905 from Finland.

I landed in New York and went on an immigrant train with many others from the Scandinavian countries to the state of Minnesota. I wanted to have a farm, but I needed money. So I went to work in an iron mine--the Mesabi Iron Range, the biggest in the world.

The work was hard, and it was dangerous. The air was bad because there was only one shaft; the iron dust got in our lungs. Plenty of young men I knew died of silicosis [a lung disease] from that mine in later years.

When I was 17, I met Solveig [a Finnish girl]. We were married, and I got a homestead in the woods near Canada. I had to work hard to get the land ready to plant. But the soil was good--thick and black. It was very different from the thin sandy ground of my father's farm in Finland. Here it was almost like magic.

I became an American citizen in 1907. The first vote I ever cast was for Teddy Roosevelt. We really felt like Americans then, electing a President.

[Peter's wife, Solveig, died during a flu epidemic at age 27. Peter and his children remained on the farm until the children were grown.] I sold the land then and made my living as a carpenter in the town. I went back last year [in the 1970s] and saw the place. Everything looks different. [Farming is] easier now, but I don't think they are as happy as we were when I first cleared the land.

Time Line: Great Migrations

1840s   The Irish potato famine
        sends about 1.5 million Irish
        immigrants to the U.S. Crop
        failures and political unrest
        in Germany result in about
        4 million German immigrants
        in the next four decades.

1865    The Central Pacific Railroad
        hires 50 Chinese men; within
        two years, 90 percent of that
        workforce is Chinese.

1882    Congress passes the Chinese
        Exclusion Act, an
        attempt to stop Chinese
        immigration. Pogroms in
        Russia cause more than
        1 million Jews to flee to America.

1892    Ellis Island opens in New York Harbor.

1904    U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
        makes a "gentleman's agreement"
        with Japan to end Japanese
        immigration.

1910    Angel Island opens as an
        immigration station and
        detention center in San
        Francisco Bay.

1921    Congress passes an emergency
        immigration act, which
        cuts the number of immigrants
        from 800,000 in 1921
        to 300,000 a year later.

1924    The Immigration Exclusion Act establishes
        an annual quota of immigrants,
        favoring people from northwestern
        Europe over those from Asia. The first
        great waves of immigration are over.

1943    The Chinese Exclusion Act and later
        acts aimed at Asians are repealed.

Words to Know

* immigrant: someone who comes to a country in order to settle there, * interpreter: an individual who translates from one language to another.

write it!

Research the experiences of an immigrant group from the time period. What challenges and pleasures did kids your age have? Invent diary of a young immigrant. Include period details.

Your Turn

THINK ABOUT IT

What circumstances might cause you to emigrate from your country?

Sources: The narratives were adapted from longer accounts from: Island of Hope, Island of Tears, by David M. Brownstone, Irene M. Franck, and Douglass L. Brownstone, [c] 1979 by the authors, published by Penguin Books USA; First Generation, by June Namias, [c] 1978 by the author, published by Beacon Press, 1978; the Digital History Web site (digitalhistory.uh.edu); and American Mosaic, by Joan Morrison and Charlotte Fox Zabusky, [c] 1980 by the authors, published by Dutton.

* OBJECTIVE

Students should understand

* Nearly 25 million immigrants came to the U.S. during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

* Where the immigrants came from, how and why they came, and what their experiences were like.

* TEACHING STRATEGY

Ask students if they have heard the U.S. described as a melting pot or great mosaic. What is meant by those terms?

* BACKGROUND

This article features excerpts from first-person accounts by immigrants who settled in a new and often strange land. Primary sources--letters, diaries, oral histories, and other firsthand accounts--are vital to historians. They give us a look at history through the eyes of people who actually lived it, with an immediacy that second- or third-hand reports and analyses cannot duplicate.

* CRITICAL THINKING

MAKING INFERENCES: Why did many early immigrants take such difficult jobs? (They needed work that did not require much schooling or much knowledge of English. Also, lacking money, most had to take whatever jobs they could get.)

MAKING COMPARISONS: In what ways were the experiences of the four people featured in this article much the same? What, if anything, about them was different? (Answers will vary.)

* ACTIVITY

SEEK AND TELL: In 1910, an immigration station opened on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Though known as the Ellis Island of the West, it was more a detention center than a reception center, its purpose being to reduce the number of Chinese entering the country. Have students find out more about Angel Island (at kqed.org/wlpacificlink/history /angelisland/video, for instance), then share or discuss what they have learned.

STANDARDS

SOCIAL STUDIES, GRADES 5-8

* Time, continuity, and change: How immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries described their own experiences, values, and traditions.

* Global connections: How one part of the world can be affected by changing conditions elsewhere.

RESOURCES

PRINT

* Brownstone, David M., et al., Island of Hope, Island of Tears (Barnes &, Noble Books, 2000). Grades 6-8.

* Collier, Christopher, et al., A Century of Immigration: 1820-1924 (Marshall Cavendish Inc., 2000). Grades 5 & up.

WEB SITES

* Ellis Island History ellisisland.com/indexHistory.html

* Immigrants' Audio Clips/ Ellis Island historychannel.com/exhibits /ellisisle

QUICK QUIZ

* Use a word from this list to correctly complete each sentence.

asthma, California, Canada, China, civil war, diphtheria, Ellis Island, England, Europe, factories, famine, farms, India, Japan, the Lower East Side, Manhattan Island, the Midwest, mines, New England, New Jersey, pogroms, programs, railroads, Scandinavia, silicosis

6. During the 1840s, about 1.5 million people left Ireland for the U.S. to escape from a --.

7. Thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in the American West to help build --.

8. More than 1 million Russians fled to the U.S. to escape from --.

9. Millions of European immigrants who arrived aboard ships went first to a reception center on --.

10. Some immigrants of the early 20th century found work in the textile mills of --.

11. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt made a "gentleman's agreement" to end immigration from --.

12. Many of the people who settled on farms in the Great Plains and Great Lakes states came from --.

13. Homesteaders made their living on --.

14. Iron miners working in poor conditions often breathed iron dust, which caused a lung disease called --.

15. The Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924 established a quota that favored people from northwestern --.

ANSWERS

6. famine

7. railroads

8. pogroms

9. Ellis Island

10. New England

11. Japan

12. Scandinavia

13. farms

14. silicosis

15. Europe