To find your immigrant ancestors who made their way to America through ports other than New York, you can consult: Italians arrived to New York – The passenger lists of the ships that arrived in New York. The little black-eyed Italian girl clad in green petticoat and scarlet bodice, toddling along with a small rocking chair in both hands, where does she belong? Forty Lire? It is the scum of the earth we are getting now, says some one. MAY 27, 1920. Medieval elites used handwashing as a shrewd ‘power play.’ Here’s how. In the U.S., in particular, the way we remember migration is as a success story where people came, maybe struggled for a while, but in the end lived happily ever after. Rear view of an immigrant family on Ellis Island looking across New York Harbor at the Statue of Liberty, 1930s. From 1892 to 1954, over 12 million immigrants entered the United States through the island. Shall his development culminate and cease with such material rewards? Environment counts quite as much. Between 1880 and 1920, over one million immigrants arrived and settled in New York City so that by 1910, fully 41 percent of all New Yorkers were foreign born. Unlucky ship which has any contagious or infectious disease on board! At last he broke forth: For the love of heaven, is there none o' yez here speaks English ?". Those who have passed the first examination are then inspected by two specialists in eye diseases. In the U.S., there was also agreement that the so-called “Jewish problem” in Europe was not simply the problem of German and Austrian Jews but, in the words of one state department official, the problem of “seven million unwanted Jews between the Rhine and the Russian frontier.” But no Western government actually wanted Jews on their own territory. Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. More slowly the mind of this foreign-born American yields to its new surroundings. Those who remain in New York City, and they are, alas, far too many, are carried to the Barge Office on the Ellis Island ferry boat. Relatively wet decades had protected them, but, during the early 1930s, without rain, the exposed fertile topsoil turned to dust, and without sod or windbreaks such as trees, rolling winds churned the dust into massive storms that blotted out the sky, choked settlers and livestock, and rained dirt not only across the region but as far east as Washington, D.C., These entering into the blood of the first immigrants made them the great nation builders of history. After the doctors have been passed, the immigrants come to the matrons, who question the females whether they are married or single, and hold those for whom they deem further examination necessary. Ellis Island, New York, the first port of call for millions of immigrants to the United States. In fact, part of what stimulated the anti-immigration movement in Eastern Europe was the extraordinary suffering of many migrants in the U.S. What a task to "size up" five hundred of all tongues and races in a single day! This analysis is part of a larger comparative project on immigrants in New York today and at the beginning of the century, the two peak periods in the city's immigration history. Vast hordes numbering nearly a million in a single year bear down upon us, but the United States moves serenely on, undisturbed and apparently not at all awed by the thought that she is absorbing more than the natural increase of southern Italians and Slovaks; more than half the natural increase of Russian Jews, Austrian, Polish, Croatians, and Slovenians. The history of these early migrations is a tale of tremendous social upheavals accompanied by long years of bloodshed, cruel misery and suffering. The Volkwanderung of the sons of Noah, the Hebrews, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Tartars, of all the tribes and nations whose epoch-making migratory adventures have furnished an inexhaustible theme to minstrel, bard and dramatist for centuries, are as mere excursion parties compared with this marvelous pouring of the nations of the world into the land which stands for kindliness, with protection and freedom for all.