American Immigration History

Part A each should be 250 words long

part B each should be 200 words long

 

 

Northeastern University

College of Professional Studies

 

Hst. 2425: “Coming to America”, U.S. Immigration History                                                     C. Cox

Midterm Questions, Due-Date, March 29Spring, 2017

 

Two of the following three essay choices will be written at home and submitted class-time, March 29.

Several rules govern your essay creation.  First, if you quote or paraphrase readings or lectures,

make sure to provide a simple source citation within the text of your writing. You are expected

touse the testimonies from the assigned website readings as illustrations or examples of your main

points. You will use five terms listed below in each of your essays.

 

Terms:   Americanization; “asylum theme”; indenturers; American “Wake”; “push”/”pull”/”passage”;

ethnicity; nativism; assimilation; “Great Famine”; Federalist Party; Know Nothing Party;

Homestead Act, 1862; Immigration Restriction League; “hyphenates”; three primary waves of

immigration.

 

Question Choices:

Many immigrants came to America as “indenturers”. Their experiences, however, would vary considerably depending on their origin and circumstance, where they settled, and what they faced after having worked off the terms of their contracts. Your task is first to explain what being “indentured” meant. For example, the first Africans to be brought to America were originally considered “indentured”. Yet their fate would be very different from the whites who also came as “indentured”. (Dinnerstein goes to considerable length to show the evolution of the concept of “slavery” in the American colonies.) What did being indentured mean to those who settled in Virginia and the southern colonies, versus those who came as indentured and settled in the northern colonies? Finally, provide testimonies for each of the kinds of experiences which best illustrate these different kinds of immigrants.

Define the differences in the “push”, “passage”, and “pull” factors of three different immigrant groups which come to America between 1607 and 1830? Use testimonies from the various websites provided in the first weeks of readings which illustrate individuals from these groups. Also, are there any testimonies which present how the resident Anglo-Americans feel about subsequent groups which came to America , especially after the Revolution? (For example, what does Benjamin Franklin think about German immigrants and their presence in Pennsylvania?)

When we reach the 1840s, we see the arrival of two new large groups of immigrants. First are the Germans who will move through the East Coast and settle in the Midwest. Then the Irish will also come at this same time. Unlike the Germans, however, the Irish will settle in cities along the East Coast of the country. Your job is to describe what makes these two groups so different from one another. Why are the Irish so different from other groups that have arrived by this time period?  In the readings, what are some of the “native” American fears being presented over the Irish presence in America? And by the way, who is Maria Monk?

.The second part of the midterm is for you to take four of the following pairs of terms and answer the following: #1, what does each term mean;  #2, what relationship do you see that each term shares with the other in the pair. Each response should be no less than three-quarters a page each.Anti-Catholic sentiment – Samuel Morse

Americanization – assimilation

Democrat-Republican Party – Federalist Party

Scotch-Irish – Irish

Puritans (Calvinists) – Society of Friends (Quakers)

indenturers – slaves

Know-Nothing Party –Protestant Association of N.Y. City

“old” immigrants – “new” immigrants

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – Asiatic Exclusion League of 1905

Immigration Restriction League – Dillingham Commission Report