What was immigration like in the 1900s

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants.

Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America.

Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants. Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa.

The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in By , there were some 7, Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to , by , according to some estimates.

Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of , but the practice continued. The U. Civil War resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that , to , Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around to The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the midth century. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast.

Between and , some 4. Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of , more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group. During the mids, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States.

Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25, Chinese had migrated there by the early s. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics—especially the Irish—experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs.

In the s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party also called the Know-Nothings tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U. Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of , which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America.

Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages. For much of the s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states.

However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from to Between and , a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants.

People in their twenties were often the most exposed to infectious diseases because of the long hours and dirty conditions they were expected to work in. Urban families realized that most likely at least one of their children would not reach the age of five. It was even more unlikely that parents would have most of their children survive their twenties to have children of their own. As a result, many working-class families adopted a sense of fatalism and planned on having large families so that at least some of their children would survive.

The answers to these questions came later in the nineteenth century with the emergence of germ theory. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, people sought to better understand and manage infectious diseases. A large part of this process was the widespread acceptance of germ theory. By stressing personal hygiene, however, responsibility for sickness was placed on the individual. This caused many people to blame the poor and infected for spreading their diseases.

It was not until the s and s that Americans began to realize that an individual was not entirely to blame for the spread of disease. As scientists analyzed transmission patterns of infectious diseases, they began to understand how specific pathogens were the causes of specific diseases.

At first, many doctors doubted that something as small as a single bacterium could cause such deadly diseases. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, germ theory gained widespread acceptance in the medical community.

The work of scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch helped convince doctors and the public that the ideas proposed by germ theory were in fact true. Their work focused on testing the spawning of infections from bacteria, proving that specific pathogens were the causes of specific diseases. Convinced of the science behind germ theory, doctors and public health officials began testing water, food, and blood samples for traces of specific diseases. Using this data, government officials scrapped the old plan that emphasized simply ridding cities of waster and introduced a new strategy based on germ theory.

Highlighting that diseases were often spread by individual contact, the new public health strategy focused on educating people on how they could prevent the transmission of diseases. The introduction of germ theory shifted the focus of public health and disease prevention away from citywide waste control towards an emphasis on personal contact and the individual spread of disease. A water- and food-borne bacteria, the disease spread easily and caused about a ten percent fatality rate.

Typhoid typically struck hardest in cities without proper water sanitation systems, such as New York. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, when most American cities had built water treatment facilities, typhoid fever was still an issue and public health officials did not understand why. The answer was that many people remained typhoid carriers, without showing symptoms of the disease.

Carriers showed no signs of illness themselves, but were host to the typhoid bacteria and could spread the disease to others. An Irish immigrant cook living in New York City, Mary was the first recorded carrier of typhoid fever.

As a cook, Mary unknowingly spread the disease to many of the wealthy families she worked for across the city. In , Mary began working in a summer rental home for a New York banker. Over the summer, typhoid fever struck over half of the people living in the home and the banker became worried that he would not be able to rent out the house again until he found the source of the disease.

The banker hired George Soper to investigate the outbreak. In , Soper turned over his findings to the New York City health department. The health department proceeded to apprehend Mary and quarantine her in a hospital. By this point, Mary was extremely untrusting of any health officials and frequently acted aggressively towards them. For three years, Mary was forcibly held in health department custody.

Mary was eventually released under the condition that she never cook again. Mary lived in forced isolation for the rest of her life, until her death in Skip to content. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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