Question

Describe how the arrival of growing numbers of Anglo-Americans affected California society in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. You may consider how growing Anglo-American dominance changed society, the environment, the economy, and the lives of various racial/ethnic groups, among other possible changes.

Answer 1

Immigration to North America commenced with Spanish settlers in the sixteenth century, and French and English settlers in the seventeenth century. In the century before the American Revolution, there used to be a principal wave of free and indentured labor from England and different parts of Europe as nicely as large-scale importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean.
Although some degree of immigration has been non-stop all through American history, there have been two epochal periods: the 1880 to 1924 age of mass migration, chiefly from southern and japanese Europe, and the post-1965 wave of immigration, exceptionally from Latin America and Asia.Each of these eras added greater than 25 million immigrants, and the modern wave is a long way from finished. During some of the top years of immigration in the early 1900s, about one million immigrants arrived annually, which used to be extra than one percentage of the total US populace at the time. In the early twenty-first century, there have been a few years with extra than one million felony immigrants, but with a complete US population of nearly 300 million, the relative have an impact on is an awful lot less than it was once in the early phase of the twentieth century.
The first impact of immigration is demographic. The 70 million immigrants who have arrived due to the fact that the founding of the republic (formal archives have only been stored considering the fact that 1820) are accountable for the majority of the modern American population.Most Americans have obtained a experience of historical continuity from America’s founding, however this is mainly the end result of socialization and education, no longer descent. The one section of the American populace with the longest record of historical contract are African Americans. Almost all African Americans are the descendants of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century arrivals.
Much of the historic debate over the consequences of immigration has focused on immigrant “origins” – where they got here from. Early in the twentieth century, when immigration from southern and jap Europe used to be at its peak, many old-stock Americans sought to hold the standard photograph of the united states of america as mainly composed of descendants from northwest Europe, mainly of English Protestant stock.The immigration restrictions of the 1920s have been calibrated to preserving the historic “national origins” of the American population.The American population has, however, continually been an awful lot more diverse than the “Anglo-centric” image of the eighteenth century. The first American census in 1790, rapidly after the formation of the United States, counted a bit much less than 4 million people, of whom at least 20 per cent had been of African descent.There are no respectable figures on the numbers of American Indians prior to the late nineteenth century, but they had been the dominant populace of the eighteenth century in most of the territories that sooner or later grew to be the United States. The estimates of the non-English-origin population in 1790 vary from 20 to 40 per cent.
Each new wave of immigration to the United States has met with some diploma of hostility and famous fears that immigrants will damage American society or will now not conform to the prevailing “American way of life”. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin complained about the “Palatine Boors” who had been trying to Germanize the province of Pennsylvania and refused to study English.Throughout the nineteenth century, Irish and German Americans, especially Catholics, had been not viewed to be thoroughly American in phrases of lifestyle or reputation with the aid of old-stock Americans. In May 1844, there have been three days of rioting in Kensington, an Irish suburb of Philadelphia, which culminated in the burning of two Catholic church buildings and different property.[9] This case was once one incident of many for the duration of the 1840s and 1850s – the heyday of the “Know Nothing Movement” – when Catholic churches and convents have been destroyed and monks were attacked by using Protestant mobs.
The hostility of old-line Americans to “foreigners” accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as racial ideology and anti-Semitism also became part of American consciousness. The rising tide of nativism – the fear of foreigners – had deep roots in anti-Catholicism and a fear of overseas radicals. The new dominant component of this ideology in the late nineteenth century was the belief in the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race”. These beliefs and the hyperlink to immigration limit had sizable aid among many well-educated elites. The Immigration Restriction League, based with the aid of young Harvard-educated Boston Brahmins in 1894, recommended a literacy check to slow the tide of immigration.It was once thought that a literacy take a look at would minimize immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which used to be sending an “alarming quantity of illiterates, paupers, criminals, and madmen who endangered American character and citizenship”.
Cities, where most immigrants settled, had been derided and feared as places crammed with hazardous human beings and radical ideas.These sentiments had been frequently formulated by way of intellectuals, however they resonated with many white Americans who were reared in as a substitute parochial and homogenous rural and small-town environments. While some reformers, such as Jane Adams, went to work to alleviate the many troubles of urban slums, others, such as Henry Adams, the descendent of two American presidents and a noted man of letters, expressed virulent nativism and anti-Semitism.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was once the first step toward a closed society. From the Eighties to the 1920s, a diverse set of groups, ranging from the old-line New England elites and the Progressive Movement in the Midwest to the Ku Klux Klan, led a marketing campaign to halt undesirable immigrants from Europe.[16] In the early decades of the twentieth century, the nascent pseudo science of Eugenics was once used to support claims of the inferiority of the new immigrants relative to old-stock Americans. Passing the country wide origins quotas in the early Nineteen Twenties used to be supposed to cut out each person from Asia and Africa and to sharply decrease the numbers of arrivals from southern and japanese Europe.
The duration from 1924 to 1965, when a exceedingly restrictive immigration policy was once in place, used to be extraordinary in American history. For these who were reared in this era, it may appear that the high tiers of immigration experienced for the duration of the remaining three a long time of the twentieth century are unusual. However, high stages of immigration characterised most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the first two decades of the twentieth.
The impact of the 1965 Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act, additionally recognized as the Hart-Cellar Act, was once a surprise to coverage makers and many experts. The most important intent of the 1965 Act used to be to repeal the national foundation quotas enacted in the 1920s, which had been viewed discriminatory through the teenagers and grandchildren of southern and jap European immigrants. The advocates of reform in the Sixties were not pushing for a essential new wave of immigration. Their expectation was that there would be a small increase of arrivals from Italy, Greece, and a few other European countries as families that were divided by means of the immigration restrictions of the Twenties were allowed to be reunited, but that no long-term extend would result.
The new criteria for admission under the 1965 Act were household reunification and scarce occupational skills.The new desire machine allowed tremendously skilled professionals, mainly doctors, nurses, and engineers from Asian countries, to immigrate and in the end to sponsor their families. About the identical time, and largely independently of the 1965 Immigration Act, immigration from Latin America commenced to rise. Legal and undocumented migration from Mexico surged after a transient farm-worker programme regarded as the Bracero Program used to be shut down in 1964.Migration from Cuba arose from the tumult of Fidel Castro’s revolution, as first elites and then professional and middle-class households fled persecution and the imposition of socialism in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in the 1970s, there have been numerous waves of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong refugees following from the cave in of American-supported regimes in Southeast Asia. Then in the 1980s, there were new refugees from Central American nations such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Each of these streams of immigration as well as refugee inflows has spawned secondary waves of immigration as family members followed. By 2000, there had been over 30 million foreign-born individuals in the United States, of whom almost one-third arrived in the prior decade. Adding together immigrants and their teenagers (the 2d generation), greater than 60 million human beings – or one in 5 Americans – have recent roots from different countries.Although the contemporary stages of immigration are now not equal – in relative phrases – to the age of mass migration in the early twentieth century, the absolute numbers of current immigrants a long way exceed that of any prior time in American records or the ride of any different country.
American records can't be separated from the history of immigration. Or, as Handlin put it, “Immigrants had been American history.”During the center decades of the nineteenth century, immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia played a main role in settling the frontier. Irish immigrants labored as labourers in cities and had been the important supply of labour in the building of transportation networks, which includes canals, railroads, and roads. Some have estimated that the manpower advantage of the Union forces throughout the Civil War was once largely due to immigrants who had settled in the northern states.
Immigrants have additionally performed an vital position in the transition to an urban industrial economic system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Immigrant employees have constantly been over-represented in skilled trades, mining, and as peddlers, merchants, and labourers in urban areas. Immigrants and their teens were the majority of employees in the garment sweatshops of New York, the coalfields of Pennsylvania, and the stockyards of Chicago. The cities of America for the duration of the age of industrialization had been specifically immigrant cities (Gibson and Jung 2006).The rapidly increasing industrial financial system of the North and Midwest drew disproportionately on immigrant labour from 1880 to 1920 and then on African American employees from the South from 1920 to 1950. In 1900, about three-quarters of the populations of many massive cities have been composed of immigrants and their children, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Detroit.Immigrants and their young people remained the majority of the urban population, mainly in the industrial cites of the Northeast and Midwest till the 1920s.
Immigrants and their teens have also performed an vital role in modern-day American politics, for example, in forming the Roosevelt coalition in the Thirties and again in the 1960s with the election of John F. Kennedy. The seeds of the 1932 Roosevelt coalition had been established in 1928, when Al Smith, an Irish American (on his mother’s side) Catholic from New York City, attracted the immigrant urban vote to the Democratic Party. Although Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith in 1928, a quantity of scholars have attributed the shift from the Republican dominance of the government in the Twenties to the New Deal coalition of the Thirties to the growing share, turnout, and partisanship of the city ethnic vote following quite a few a long time of mass immigration.
Although the age of mass immigration had ended in the 1920s, the teens of immigrants formed 20 percent of the doable citizens in 1960.The political leanings of the 2nd generation can be inferred from research on the relationship between faith and political preferences. In the many years following the World War II era, white Protestants, and mainly middle class white Protestants outdoor the South, have been the base of the Republican Party, whilst Catholic and Jewish voters have been disproportionately Democratic.The majority of early twentieth-century southern and eastern European immigrants have been Catholic or Jewish.The reform periods of the New Deal of the Thirties and the New Frontier (which led to the Great Society programmes of Lyndon Johnson) were made feasible through the mass migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Immigrants and their descendants had been also vital in the improvement of famous American way of life and in growing the tremendous picture of immigration in the American mind. Immigrants and the second era have performed a superb role in the American innovative arts, together with writing, directing, producing, and acting in American movies and performs for most of the first half of the twentieth century (Buhle 2004; Gabler 1988; Most 2004; Phillips 1998; Winokur 1996). The majority of Hollywood movie directors who have won two or greater Academy Awards (Oscars) had been either immigrants or the teens of immigrants. Many of the most fantastically considered composers and playwrights of Broadway had been the teens of immigrants, together with George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and Leonard Bernstein.These composers and lyricists who wrote a lot of the widespread American songbook were largely second- and third-generation Jewish immigrants who have been reared in ethnic enclaves, but their track has defined the quintessential American musical way of life of the twentieth century.
Although first- and second-generation immigrant artists have usually been anxious to assimilate to American society and to adopt “Anglo-sounding” names,they have additionally broadened American tradition to make it more receptive and open to outsiders. The Hollywood theme “that all people can make it in America” is an Americanized model of the rags-to-riches story – one that is appealing to humans who are striving for upward mobility. Many Hollywood and Broadway productions have also given us poignant debts of outsiders who warfare to be understood and accepted. Perhaps it is not so stunning that the Statue of Liberty has grow to be the pre-eminent countrywide image of the United States.