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Immigration
Historical
Overview
America's cultural identity embraces people of diverse backgrounds: African, Asian, European, and indigenous American. Our culture has been shaped by the interaction of many different cultural and religious groups. Our art, clothing, holidays, language, literature, music, and sports reflect the commingling of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural groups within one nation. Around the turn of the twentieth century, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population's ethnic and religious composition. In a single decade—1900 to 1910--8.8 million immigrants entered the United States. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, the “new immigrants” came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish and two-thirds of them settled in cities.
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This
site was updated on 09-Feb-10.
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