The Guilded Age and Immigration
Ellis Island Foundation, Inc.:
http://www.ellisisland.org/
The Ellis Island Foundation works in partnership with the National Park Service to preserve the physical structure of the Statue of Liberty as well as create public education programs about the site and the history of immigration in American. This website includes a “Passenger Search,” which allows users to locate individuals and families by name, approximate age and gender; an immigration timeline and six family profiles (which appear as “The Peopling of America” and “Family Histories” under the subheading “Ellis Island,” as does a brief history of the island and photographic albums of the site in the late nineteenth century, or “then,” and “now”). Finally, there are tips for researching your own family history and six sample genealogies profiling Irish, African, Chinese, Bohemian, Mexican, and Italian experiences. It is a terrific site for encouraging students to begin conducting research on either a specific group of immigrants or their own family history.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum:
www.tenement.org
Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site preserves a six-story brick tenement building that was home to an estimated 7,000 people, from over 20 nations, between 1863 and 1935. It is located at 97 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, and is the heart of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which was founded to promote tolerance and historical perspective at this gateway to America. Six on-line guided tours and special exhibitions highlight different families and ethnicities that lived in the building, including Italian, Irish, Jewish and German. The “Play” section of the website features a virtual tour of the Tenement Museum, an interactive “Immigration Game,” and several lessons plans, many exploring national symbols, such as flags and songs. Additional lesson plans are filed under “Education,” and provide advice for teaching with objects, using primary sources, and conducting oral histories.
Immigration History Research Center:
http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/
Founded in 1965, the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) is an interdisciplinary institution at the University of Minnesota that studies international migration with a special emphasis on immigrant and refugee life in the U.S. It sponsors seminars, lectures, and workshops that bring a highly specialized and multi-disciplinary group of University of Minnesota researchers into dialogue with a wide range of people including national and international peers, university and high-school students, and teachers, journalists, photographers and filmmakers, and also communities of immigrants and ethnic Americans. A special section for “Educators and Students” includes information about teacher and student fellowship opportunities, as well as an excellent lesson plan entitled “Tenement Museum: From Ellis Island to Orchard Street with Victoria Confino” a fourteen-year-old Sephardic-Jewish immigrant from the early 20th century whom we will be “meeting” at the Tenement Museum.The lesson plan encourages students tobegin a journey as an immigrant traveling to the United States during 1916. They are asked to choose a character and select three precious items to take with them through Ellis Island. They are also asked to make decisions about household chores, and write a post card to family back in Europe. While students make their decisions, Victoria Confino describes her actual life and her journey to the U.S
Immigrant Voices-Primary Sources: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/ethnic_am.cfm
This website is part of the Digital History initiative of the University of Houston. It includes “The Huddled Masses,” a set of twenty brief histories (each 1-2 pages) that provide a detailed history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigration, including definitions of key terms in the study of immigration, guides to immigration in film and fiction, and discussion of immigration and music, language, disease as well as the economics of immigration. There are also more in-depth sections, including historian’s essays, primary source databanks, and photograph albums for Chinese, Irish, and Italian Americans. Finally, there is a beautiful virtual “photograph album” that pairs images with excerpts from Edward A. Steiner’s On the Trail of the Immigrant published by Fleming H. Revell Company, NY in 1906.
“Destination America,” website for a 4-part PBS Series: http://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/
This website is the online companion to four hour-long chapters of a PBS miniseries by the same name which first aired in 2005. It includes a section exploring the variety of motivations behind immigration, including religion, oppression, employment, and freedom of expression. It also provides a detailed immigration timeline and interactive map, and six in-depth profiles of individuals from around the world who are featured in the television series. A resource section includes lists of additional suggested readings and online resources, as well as information about beginning genealogical research. Finally, a free Teacher’s Guide offers educators lesson plans based on Five Freedoms featured in the immigration documentary: Freedom from Fear, Freedom to Create, Freedom from Oppression, Freedom from Want and Freedom of Religion.
Irish Immigration to America—Library of Congress American Memory Project: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/irish2.html
This online exhibition by the Library of Congress explores the Irish immigration experience in America. It is part of a larger exhibition about the variety of immigration experiences by various nationalities, so be sure to explore the left-hand picture bar for information about: Native Americans, Africans, Germans, Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Polish and Russian experiences (the website address for the full exhibition is: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/introduction.html). Additional sections highlight adaptation and assimilation, employment patterns, religious conflict and discrimination, questions of identity and contributions of these various groups to American culture.
From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/
From Haven to Home is a Library of Congress exhibition marking 350 years of Jewish life in America. The exhibition features more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions. Features include an interactive timeline (from 1492 to the present) and a check list to the exhibition objects, each with its own high-resolution jpeg image. Sections of the exhibition address questions of religion, education, economic opportunity, and family connections.
“Remembering 1882: Fighting for Civil Rights in the Shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” online exhibition of the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum and Learning Center:
http://www.remembering1882.org.
In 2007, on the 125th anniversary of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Chinese Historical Society of America's Remembering 1882 project launched a traveling exhibit, a museum theater performance, and a symposium of legal and historical experts. Drawn from photographs, newspaper commentaries, political cartoons, and other objects in CHSA’s collections, the “Remembering 1882” exhibit provides a flavor for the intrigue, passion and poignancy of this dramatic chapter in American history. The online version of this exhibition is divided into seven thematic categories that touch on questions of immigration motivations, detention, discrimination, opportunities, and American values. There is also a brief seven-and-a-half minute video overview of the exhibition’s content, a gallery of images, and timeline, and a 36-page booklet of short essays by Chinese-American historians.
“Becoming American: The Chinese-American Experience,” PBS Documentary: http://www.pbs.org/becomingamerican/
In every immigrant group, each generation finds a balance between the values and practices of its heritage, and the mores of its adopted country. What is lost and what is gained, both personally and culturally, when one sheds part of one's heritage to make way for a new self-identity? Bill Moyers and a team of filmmakers explore this dramatic portion of America's history and confront myths about the Chinese in America that have flourished in the void. The documentary is divided into three programs, and this website offers a corresponding section on each theme. In Part One, “Gold Mountain Dreams,” illuminates their all-too-forgotten role in settling the West and building the western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad, perhaps the greatest engineering feat of the 19th century. Part Two, “Between Two Worlds,” tells the story of hostile years when Chinese Americans existed in a kind of limbo, denied the rights of their new country and no longer at home in their former one. They found refuge in Chinatowns, insular worlds that provided a sense of security and the companionship of kinsmen. Part Three, “No Turning Back,” examines the impact of World War II which ushered in major changes for Chinese Americans. In an abrupt about face, America's political establishment suddenly embraced them. Congress quickly repealed the exclusion laws and Chinese Americans began their rise to the pinnacle of U.S. life. A final section explores modern-day experiences of Chinese-Americans, and a downloadable 48-page Educator’s Guide provides contextual essays and several engaging lesson plan suggestions.
“Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963 Chicago: Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the College of Architecture and the Arts,” the University of Illinois at Chicago: http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp/contents.htm
Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963 is a history website that has been constructed at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is sponsored by the College of Architecture and the Arts and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. The site contains more than 900 separate texts, including correspondence, newspaper articles, unpublished memoirs, magazine and journal articles, maps, and hundreds of images of historic significance for documenting the life and times of Jane Addams, the history of the social settlement movement and of Hull-House, and the history of the Near West Side neighborhood and its immigrant communities. Besides the introduction page, the Urban Experience website is divided into six major sections: Historical Narrative, Timeline, Images, Geography, Teachers’ Resources, and Search. The Historical Narrative is divided into twelve chapters, which vary from 19th-century social science theory to neighborhood history to a brief biography of Jane Adams. Each contains an interpretive narrative, selected essays and images, and a great variety of historical texts including relevant letters, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, popular literature, political tracts and cartoons. |
