---->  PART 1

            Using the information from the documents and your knowledge of social studies, answer the questions that follow each document.  There are 51 questions, some have multiple parts, be sure to complete all of them.

---->  PART 2

           For part 2 you will create a "T chart" with reasons immigrants came to the United States on one side, and hardships faced after they arrived on the other.  Using your T chart you will place each document on the side of the T chart it best fits. Your answers to the questions and the T chart will help you write the essay in which you will be asked to:

      -->Explain the reasons immigrants came to the United States

      -->Discuss hardships faced by immigrants after they arrived in the United States

Document to Analyze

Document 1:

 Number of immigrants entering the USA each year

1. Based on this graph, Identify two conditions in their native countries that caused immigrants to come to the United States. 

2. Based on this graph, identify one situation in the United States that led to an increase of immigrants coming into the nation.

Document 2:

Account of Irish immigrant

 ***This is part of an interview with Catherine Moran McNamara, an Irish immigrant, who arrived in the United States around 1900.***

…There was twelve in our family.  The oldest died and the other one went to Australia with my uncle.  I was about five when she went.  So there was ten of us, you might say, in our family.  We had to pay every cent we possibly could produce to taxes.  Every war England had she had you pay her part, even though you just had nothing, and you had to pay on your land some expenses of it…

My mother kept house and my father had no work but just the bit of land we had, to work it, and give the cream of the milk to England for everything.  They had to get the big rent and then if the year was bad and the stuff didn’t grow, we suffered on that.

The Irish lived under awful stress.  I’ve seen the family thrown out.  I recall that distinctly because we took them in our barn.  They had no place for their bed, for anything.  I seen the little child, this is God’s truth, I’ll never forget this, it was just about a year and a half, put out in the little cradle. I see the pots put out and the coals of fire put into the iron oven they used to bake with.  Everything they had, put into the yard.  If they were caught in that yard that night they’d be shot or somthin’.

England did this, of course, and her regime. She had certain ones to do it.  The landlord he was English owned Ireland then…

3. Based on this document, state two reasons many Irish citizens immigrated to the United States around 1900.

account of a Greek immigrant

This is part of an interview with George Kokkas, a Greek immigrant, who arrived in the United States in 1969

…Work over there [in Greece] was very bad.  In those days [1967], a worker in Greece made about five dollars a day, when a worker’s pay in the Untied States was about thirty dollars a day.  But the reason I came to the United States was because the situation in Greece was bad.  And I was concerned about the education of my kids.  Greece in those days had only one university, and if you had kids who wanted to go to the university it was very hard to get the chance.

4. Based on this document, identify two reasons that led this Greek immigrant to move to the United States.

Immigration poster

5. Based on this document, identify one reason that many native-born Americans in the late 1800s were in favor of restricting immigration.

Picture of immigrant family

6. Based on this photograph, identify one reason that living in a tenement was often difficult for immigrants

Immigrant workers protest

Letter from Polish immigrant

I’m in this country for four months. 

I am a polish man.  I want to be American citizen…But my friends are polish people—I must live with them—I work in the shoes-shop with polish people—I stay all the time with them—at home—in the shop—anywhere.

I want live with American people, but I do not know anybody of American.  I go 4 times to teacher, and must pay $2 weekly. I wanted to take board [to live] in English house, but I could not, for earn only $5 or 6 in a week, and when I pay teacher $2, I have only $4--$3—and now English board house is too dear [expensive] for me.  Better job to get is hard for me, because I do not speak well English and I cannot understand what they say to me.  The teacher teach me—but when I come home—I must speak polish and in the shop also.  In this way I can live in your country many years—like my friends—and never speak—write well English—and never be good American citizen…

8. Based on this document, state two reasons it was difficult for this Polish immigrant to fit into American society.

U.S. Immigration graph

9. Identify the trend in immigration from the 1860’s to the 1890’s

10a.  In what year was the gap in the percentage of immigrants between Northern and Southern Europe the greatest? 

10b.  In what year was the gap the smallest?

Photograph of people in the city

Account of a sixteen year old immigrant girl working in a sweatshop

I get up at half-past five o'clock every morning and make myself a cup of coffee on the oil stove. I eat a bit of bread and perhaps some fruit and then go to work. Often I get there soon after six o'clock so as to be in good time, though the factory does not open till seven. I have heard that there is a sort of clock that calls you at the very time you want to get up, but I can't believe that because I don't see how the clock would know. 

At seven o'clock we all sit down to our machines and the boss brings to each one the pile of work that he or she is to finish during the day, what they call in English their 'stint.' This pile is put down beside the machine and as soon as a skirt is done it is laid on the other side of the machine. Sometimes the work is not all finished by six o'clock and then the one who is behind must work overtime. Sometimes one is finished ahead of time and gets away at four or five o'clock, but generally we are not done till six o'clock.

The machines go like mad all day, because the faster you work the more money you get. Sometimes in my haste I get my finger caught and the needle goes right through it. It goes so quick, though, that it does not hurt much. I bind the finger up with a piece of cotton and go on working. We all have accidents like that. Where the needle goes through the nail it makes a sore finger, or where it splinters a bone it does much harm. Sometimes a finger has to come off. Generally, though, one can be cured by a salve.

13. Using examples from the document, why do you think that?

Cartoon about immigration

14. Who does the man being eaten represent? 

15. What two immigrant groups do the people on the sides represent? 

16. What is the “Great Fear” that is mentioned in the title of this cartoon? 

17. What idea could that fear lead people in America to feel?

Family searching for potatoes in a  field

account of an Italian immigrant

In Italy, the peasants live mainly in the open air. Their houses had large rooms with stone floors which required no scrubbing. The washing of the clothes was done at nearby streams.... There were no stoves which required care. When the peasants immigrated here, they naturally settled near their friends and relatives who lived for the most part in already crowded areas. These sunshine-loving people were forced to live more or less in dark rooms; small ill-smelling tubs replaced their outdoor creeks; pulley lines their fresh green grass; wooden floors which require scrubbing, their hard stone floors. Housekeeping here required the use of tools of which they had no knowledge. The writer has come into contact with many immigrant women who had never seen a scrubbing brush. When to these new experiences is added the strangeness of the new country, strange language, and the evils which necessarily accompany congestion, and poverty [being poor] and the upbringing of American-born children, the wonder is that they adjust at all.

19a Where did people choose to settle when they reached America? 

19b. What condition did this help to contribute to in the urban areas? 

20. Identify one reason immigrants may have a hard time assimilating into American culture.

cartoon titled "Welcome to All"

The sign by the door reads "Free education, free land, free speech, free ballot, free lunch."

The sign in the middle of the cartoon reads "No oppressive taxes, no expensive kings, no compulsory military service, no knouts or dungeons."

21a. Who is the person on the left? 

21b. How do you know? 

22a. Who are the people facing him? 

22b. What would motivate these people to do what they are doing?

account of a young immigrant girl

I accepted my responsibility to help support my family even though this meant I wouldn't go to high school. I wanted to go to school, but I knew this was not possible. I was willing to help my mother because I had a sense of togetherness. I felt as if the younger children were mine as well as my mother's. My whole salary went to the family. If there wasn't enough, I did without.

23. What was the economic status of this person’s family? 

24. What is this person missing out on that was important to immigrant families because of this economic status?

25. Describe the health of the children shown in this sketch. 

26. What event may have caused them to be in that state of health? 

27a. What is represented in the image? 

27b. What does that mean? 

28a. Why did some immigrants accept this idea? 

28b. Why was it hard for some immigrants to accept this idea?

Document 18:

a Jewish mother writing about her daughter

A Jewish mother wrote to the Jewish Daily Forward about her daughter:

During the few years she was here without us she became a regular Yankee and forgot how to talk Yiddish....She says it is not nice to talk Yiddish and that I am a greenhorn....She wants to make a Christian woman out of me. She does not like me to light the Sabbath candles, to observe the Sabbath. When I light the candles, she blows them out. Once I saw her standing on the stoop with a boy so I went up to her and asked her when she would come up.... She did not reply, and later when she came up she screamed at me because I had called her by her Jewish name. But I cannot call her differently. I cannot

Source: Robert Parks and Herbert Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York, 1921), 63-64

29. What was the worry that this immigrant mother faced with her daughter?

Document 19:

The Ejectment

The Ejectment

30.What is happening in this picture

31. How might this push someone to emigrate [move] to America

Document 20:

Men picketing (protesting)

Signs Read: ''I must drink alcohol to sustain life, shall I transfer the craving to others"

"Would the prisons, asylums [institution for the mentally ill] be filled if my kind had no children"

"I cannot read this sign, by what right have I children"

32. Describe what the person who paid these people to hold the signs thinks of the men holding the signs?

Document 21:

Sweatshop labor

If a girl came in even a few minutes late, the lost time was charged against her pay. We were not permitted to talk to each other. Sometimes, some girl, unable to endure the silence any longer, would begin humming a tune which would be taken up by others near her. Marks, the foreman, would question us until he had learned who began the singing. Then he would deduct three hours from her pay. If any girl objected to this treatment she was told to look for work elsewhere. It was my first real job and I was afraid of losing it, so I tried to keep silent. But for a lively girl like me to keep her mouth shut for eleven hours is torture; it almost drove me wild. 

Maria Ganz, Rebel, 73

33. How was this girl treated by the people in charge at the factory?

34. Give some examples of how you know this.

35. What would happen if they objected to the work?

Document 22:

36. Who is greeting the immigrant in the cartoon? 

37. How are they greeting him? 

38. What do the shadows in the background symbolize?

Document 23:

39. What does this image represent?

40. What does that mean?

41. Why would this happen when immigrants came to the United States?

The bottom reads “The mortar of assimilation – and the one element that won’t mix.”

42a. Who does the woman represent?

42b. Why do you think that? 

43a. What is happening in this picture? 

43b. Why is it that one person “won’t mix”?

Getting a job

My two aunts took my mother and myself to the shop they worked in and we were hired. My mother found this adjustment hard. Both Jewish and Italian worked there. Both groups were fresh immigrants and couldn't speak English. I only heard English from my brothers and sisters when they came home from school. I was quite miserable for the first few years. I couldn't speak English. I didn't like the work or the surroundings. My mother was more miserable. She found this situation took difficult. I didn't find it as difficult because I was a child. It was something of an adventure for me. 

Grace Grimaldi in Ewen, Immigrant Women, 95

44. Identify one hardship for immigrants new to America trying to assimilate.

Immigrants working at home

45. What is the economic condition of the family in the photograph?  

46. Why would immigrant families like the one in the photograph take work home?

A group of immigrants in the street

47a. What nationality are the people in the photograph? 

47b Where might these people be when the picture was taken? 

48. Why might people of the same nationality, such as the people in the photograph, settle in one area?

Poster promoting Americanization schools

Caption under the photo reads:  These two men are brothers, one is an American Citizen and the other has just come to this country with their old mother.  See the difference in the way they dress and look.  America is a great country.  In America everybody has a chance. Everybody who comes to America from the old country ought to learn the American language and become an American citizen.  If the people that come to America do not become Americans, this country will soon be like the old country.

excerpt from the book "The Passing of the Great Race." By Madison Grant

50. According to Madison Grant how were the new immigrants (those who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) different from earlier immigrant groups? 

51. How did Grant see these newer immigrant groups cause danger to America?