One Day University

In the century between the 1820s, when mass migration from Europe began, and the 1920s, when the United States Congress began imposing severe immigration restrictions, America was transformed. The nearly 40 million immigrants from Ireland, the German states, Scandinavia, eastern and southern Europe, and in particular from the Czarist lands and Italy made America into an urban, industrial nation. The complicated patterns and motivations for leaving one home and choosing America as a new one offer us one of history’s most dramatic stories of human beings on the move, and these men and women nudged America into a transformation from its rural, Protestant, British-based beginnings to a religiously, ethnically, and linguistically diverse nation. Through this tidal wave of migration, made up of people who represented a multiplicity of tongues, creeds, tastes, and value systems, the United States emerged as a society that represented not just the sum of all these many parts but as something distinctive in world history.