Burdened with bundles and baskets, a million or more immigrant children passed through the often grim halls of Ellis Island. Having left behind their homes in Europe and other parts of the world, they made the voyage to America by steamer. Some came with parents or guardians. A few came as stowaways. But however they traveled, they found themselves a part of one of the grandest waves of human migration that the world has ever known. Children of Ellis Island explores this lost world and what it was like for an uprooted youngster at Americas golden door. Highlights include the experience of being a detained child at Ellis Islandthe schooling and games, the pastimes and amusements, the friendships, and the uneasiness caused by language barriers.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of Ellis Island written by immigrants *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "So, anyhow, we had to get off of the ship, and we were put on a tender, which took us across to Ellis Island. And when I saw Ellis Island, it's a great big place, I wondered what we were going to do in there. And we all had to get out of the tender, and then into this, and gather your bags in there, and the place was crowded with people and talking, and crying, people were crying. And we passed, go through some of the halls there, and tried to remember that the halls, big halls, big open spaces there, and there was bars, and there was people behind these bars, and they were talking different languages, and I was scared to death. I thought I was in jail." - Mary Mullins, an Irish immigrant By the middle of the 19th century, New York City's population surpassed the unfathomable number of 1 million people, despite its obvious lack of space. This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. At first, the city itself set up its own immigration registration center in Castle Garden near the site of the original Fort Amsterdam, and naturally, many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel far and thus remained in New York. Of course, the addition of so many immigrants and others with less money put strains on the quality of life. Between 1862 and 1872, the number of tenements had risen from 12,000 to 20,000; the number of tenement residents grew from 380,000 to 600,000. One notorious tenement on the East River, Gotham Court, housed 700 people on a 20-by-200-foot lot. Another on the West Side was home, incredibly, to 3,000 residents, who made use of hundreds of privies dug into a fifteen-foot-wide inner court. Squalid, dark, crowded, and dangerous, tenement living created dreadful health and social conditions. It would take the efforts of reformers such as Jacob Riis, who documented the hellishness of tenements with shocking photographs in How the Other Half Lives, to change the way such buildings were constructed. On New Year's Day 1892, a young Irish girl named Annie Moore stepped off the steamship Nevada and landed on a tiny island that once held a naval fort. As she made her way through the large building on that island, Annie was processed as the first immigrant to come to America through Ellis Island. Like so many immigrants before her, she and her family settled in an Irish neighborhood in the city, and she would live out the rest of her days there. Thanks to the opening of Ellis Island near the end of the 19th century, immigration into New York City exploded, and the city's population nearly doubled in a decade. By the 1900s, 2 million people considered themselves New Yorkers, and Ellis Island would be responsible not just for that but for much of the influx of immigrants into the nation as a whole over the next half a century. To this day, about a third of the Big Apple's population is comprised of immigrants today, making it one of the most diverse cities in the world. Ellis Island: The History and Legacy of America's Most Famous Immigration Gateway analyzes the history of Ellis Island and its integral impact on American history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Ellis Island like never before, in no time at all.

From 1910 to 1940, over half a million people sailed through the Golden Gate, hoping to start a new life in America. But they did not all disembark in San Francisco; instead, most were ferried across the bay to the Angel Island Immigration Station. For many, this was the real gateway to the United States. For others, it was a prison and their final destination, before being sent home. In this landmark book, historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung (both descendants of immigrants detained on the island) provide the first comprehensive history of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Drawing on extensive new research, including immigration records, oral histories, and inscriptions on the barrack walls, the authors produce a sweeping yet intensely personal history of Chinese "paper sons," Japanese picture brides, Korean students, South Asian political activists, Russian and Jewish refugees, Mexican families, Filipino repatriates, and many others from around the world. Their experiences on Angel Island reveal how America's discriminatory immigration policies changed the lives of immigrants and transformed the nation. A place of heartrending history and breathtaking beauty, the Angel Island Immigration Station is a National Historic Landmark, and like Ellis Island, it is recognized as one of the most important sites where America's immigration history was made. This fascinating history is ultimately about America itself and its complicated relationship to immigration, a story that continues today.

A landmark work of history that brings the voices of the past vividly to life, transforming our understanding of the immigrant's experience in America. Ellis Island. How many stories does this tiny patch of land hold? How many people had joyfully embarked on a new life here -- or known the despair of being turned away? How many were held there against their will? To tell its manifold stories, Ellis Islanddraws on unpublished testimonies, memoirs and correspondence from many internees and immigrants, including Russians, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Germans, and Poles, along with the commissioners, interpreters, doctors, and nurses who shepherded them -- all of whom knew they were taking part in a significant historical phenomenon. We see that deportations from Ellis Island were often based on pseudo-scientific ideas about race, gender, and disability. Sometimes, families were broken up, and new arrivals were held in detention at the Island for days, weeks, or months under quarantine. Indeed the island compound has spent longer as an internment camp than as a migration station. Today, the island is no less political. In popular culture, it is a romantic symbol of the generations of immigrants who reshaped the United States. But its true history reveals that today's fierce immigration debate has deep roots. Now a master storyteller brings its past to life, illustrated with unique archival photographs.

Looks at the history of the port of entry off the coast of California that was "the other Ellis Island" for Asian immigrants to the United States between 1892 and 1940.

A century ago, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, one of the world's greatest public hospitals was built. Massive and modern, the hospital's twenty-two state-of-the-art buildings were crammed onto two small islands, man-made from the rock and dirt excavated during the building of the New York subway. As America's first line of defense against immigrant-borne disease, the hospital was where the germs of the world converged. The Ellis Island hospital was at once welcoming and foreboding—a fateful crossroad for hundreds of thousands of hopeful immigrants. Those nursed to health were allowed entry to America. Those deemed feeble of body or mind were deported. Three short decades after it opened, the Ellis Island hospital was all but abandoned. As America after World War I began shutting its border to all but a favored few, the hospital fell into disuse and decay, its medical wards left open only to the salt air of the New York Harbor. With many never-before-published photographs and compelling, sometimes heartbreaking stories of patients (a few of whom are still alive today) and medical staff, Forgotten Ellis Island is the first book about this extraordinary institution. It is a powerful tribute to the best and worst of America's dealings with its new citizens-to-be.

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.