Ellis Island: The History and Legacy of America’s Most Famous Immigration Gateway

by Charles River Editors

*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 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.

Genres: History

50 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2015

About the author

Charles River Editors is an independent publisher of thousands of ebooks on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple iBookstore & provider of original content for third parties.

Reviews

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot from the short book. I used to picture Ellis Island in my head as being somewhere near the Statue of Liberty but now I know exactly where the island is because the book provided a map. I found it fascinating that the island was once much smaller, a place with oyster beds, and federal workers made the island about tens times bigger by hauling soil and rocks they removed to create New York's subway system. The personal accounts of people who experienced the island were dramatic and shocking. I've long heard about Ellis Island and I imagined it was a place of hope, a greeting place, but these personal accounts were scary at times, and some of the stories about the medical examinations were horrifying. I had no idea that some immigrants were "detained," sometimes of months. There were crude dormitories for these detainees, and they were well fed and even entertained with movies once a week. The detainees were free to read and play games and talk and make friends but they could not leave the island until whatever snag was cleared up (sometimes it was medical, sometimes it was because they needed a sponsor, etc.)

Quote from the book:
"Ultimately, one way or the other, everyone left Ellis Island. The faculty finally closed its doors on November 12, 1954, after having about 12 million men, women, and children pass through its cavernous halls. Over 60 years later, an estimated 40% of all American citizens had at least one ancestor go through Ellis Island during immigration."

[Peg Haldorson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all what I expected. Was disappointed.