from delancyplace.com:


In today's excerpt - beginning in 1840, the
largest human migration in history brought
over 30 million immigrants to America, and by
the time this migration was interrupted in
1914 by World War I, America stood as the
most prosperous nation on earth:

"The reasons for the largest human migration
in history had been long in coming.

"One of the main factors was the enormous
increase in the
European population that took place in less
than a century - from 140 million people in
1750 to 250 million in the 1840s. As the
numbers increased,
peasant families were constricted into
increasingly smaller plots of land by
powerful landlords who were anxious to reap
profits by
creating larger farms to feed the growing
cities. Soon alarming numbers of peasants
found themselves unable to subsist. They were
joined in their plight by legions of artisans
whose special
skills - passed on from father to son and
mother to daughter for generations - had
earned them both a livelihood and a respected
place in society. Now, however, scores of the
goods they had so expertly handcrafted were
being produced by the machinery of the
Industrial Revolution.
Thousands of' these artisans found themselves
out of work,
forced to move to the cities and work in
factories, where low
wages, drudgery, and the loss of their
personal independence
resulted in a sadly diminished quality of life.


"Devastating as they were, none of these
problems compared
to the series of famines that, beginning in
the 1840s,
descended upon various European nations.
Nowhere was the
situation more desperate than in Ireland
where, in 1845, a
fungus destroyed the potato crop, the single
food staple
upon which the poorer classes of the country
depended
for survival. By the time the disease began
to abate in
1849, more than a million Irish men, women, and
children had starved to death. ...


"It was not only in Ireland that famine
struck. ... A quote from the archives of the
Iowa State Historical
Society by a Polish youngster put it more
personally: 'We lived
through a famine,' he explained, '[so] we
came to America. Mother said she wanted to
see a loaf of bread on the table and
then she was ready to die.'


"There were other important reasons for the
mass exodus
as well. Despite the notions of liberty and
equality that both
the American and French revolutions had
spawned, oppressive governments in countries
such as Russia, Germany and
Turkey had denied freedom of religion,
freedom of speech,
or other rights and had brutally put down
rebellions aimed
at bringing about reform. In Russia and
Poland, massacres
called pogroms erupted. Designed to eliminate
minority
groups who lived within their borders -
particularly Jews -
some of these pogroms were carried out by the
governments
of these two countries; others were
unofficially endorsed by
them. ...

"They came in waves; ... more than five
million of them arrived between 1840
and 1880, an influx slightly greater than the
entire population
of the United States in 1790. Most emigrated
from northern
and western Europe - Scandinavians who
settled in the American Midwest; Germans who
established enclaves in
New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis,
and Milwaukee;
and British and Irish who poured into Boston,
New York, and
other northeastern communities.


"Beginning in 1880 a great shift occurred
when an even larger flood of newcomers came
from eastern, central, and
southern Europe - Russians, Poles,
Austro-Hungarians,
Greeks, Ukrainians, and Italians. In 1880
less than twenty percent of the 250,000 Jews
living in New York had come
from Eastern Europe. In the next forty years
the number
grew to 1,400,000. That was one-fourth of the
city's entire
population. In the first quarter of the
1900s, more than two
million Italians arrived. By the time the
human tide was interrupted in 1914 by World
War I, some thirty-three million
people had fled their native lands, risking
all to start life anew across the ocean.
"



Martin W. Sandler, Atlantic Ocean,
Sterling, Copyright 2008 by Martin W.
Sandler, pp. 356-364.