Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Chapter 8 Eastern Europeans


Chapter 8 was about Eastern Europeans which included Poles, Jews and Hungarians. Eastern Europeans initially came at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. They settled in cities in the North East and north central cities. 
Most of the Poles that came to America spoke Polish and were Roman Catholics. When they came to America, they already had relatives or friends there.
It was harder to count Jews than nationalities. One of the reasons that Jews migrated was to have better living conditions and in 1881 to because of religious persecution. In the nineteenth century, the Jewish population increased form about 1.5 million to about 7. In 1910, 150 thousand Jews were in tenements of about 1.5 miles with very bad living conditions. About 45 percent of those migrating were women, who came with husbands or older brothers. Most Jews came through Ellis Island, and about 7 of 10 stayed in New York.
About half of the Hungarians that came to America returned home and some knew that the would come back again. Many came because Hungary had bad economic conditions. When they first came, they had to take really low wage jobs because even though they were low in America, it was high in Hungary. When they first came, they would try to save money for their return home, but then they realized that they were probably not going back.




Sunday, October 2, 2011

Chapter 7: From the Mediterranean


Something of the things I found interesting in this chapter were:
In the early 1890’s, one in three tickets were prepaid, after the turn of the century, two in three were.
Joseph Chamberlain (officer in charge of passenger conditions) said that it was okay to keep the conditions bad for immigrants because they were used to it anyway.
Between 1880 and 1920 the highest volume of a population came in a short amount of time. About 4.1 million Italians came, but about two of three went to other part. (mostly to Brazil and Argentina).
An estimated 30 to 50 percent of Italians returned back to their country.
Most Italian imigrants were skilled artisans but there were also merchants actors, musicians, waiters, businessmen and more.
Only about 1 percent of Italian American kids were enrolled in school.
Italians had contact with crime and criminals most often as victims because of the neighborhoods they lived in.
An estimated 640,000 Greeks came between 1820 and 1975, by 1975 there were twice that many Greeks (mostly male immigrants).
Italians: barbershops, Greek: Restaurants, Chinese: laundries 
Almost all Arabs that immigrated to the United States were Christians.