Chapter 1 america a melting pot Everyone in the United States of America is an immigrant or has descended from immigrants This is true even of Native Americans whose ancestors crossed a land bridge that once existed between Asia and Alaska more than 100 centuries ago Pilgrims from England conquistadors from Spain missionaries from France the Dutch colonists and the slaves they brought from Africa all came to America from somewhere else The ancestors of Native Americans crossed a landbridge from Russia to Alaska 15,000 years ago 4
OREGON TERRITORY 1846 CEDED BY MEXICO 1848 ESTABLISHED 1818 LOUISIANA PURCHASE 1803 GADSDEN PURCHASE 1853 TEXAS ANNEXED 1845 From 1776 to Map of major land additions to the continental United States UNITED STATES PRIOR TO 1803 CEDED BY SPAIN 1819 1853 the United States went from a cluster of 13 small colonies to what would become today’s lower 48 states As it grew millions of people came to this vast new country from all over the world People of every race and religion came speaking hundreds of languages bringing their labor and skills to help build a civilization They built railroads canals bridges sewers ports and subways They worked as tenant farmers producing food for the expanding nation and many acquired their own farms They worked in factories sewing clothes and making machinery Children born in the United States were citizens from the start but their immigrant parents had to learn English and study hard to become citizens And thousands of immigrants proudly fought in wars to defend their adopted land 5
Before 1820 even with immigration America’s white population was largely homogeneous In 1790 the United States took a census It showed that 8 out of 10 Americans not counting Native Americans or black slaves in the South had English or Scottish ancestors The other 20 percent of white Americans were mostly German and Dutch This population was 98 percent Protestant an important clue to U S citizens overall values and emerging attitudes toward the waves of people who arrived later After the Revolution the first great surge of immigrants to the United States arrived between 1820 and 1860 Almost every one of these people came from Ireland England Germany Sweden Norway and Denmark These are neighboring countries in Europe and the inflow of people did not change the primarily Anglo-Protestant make-up of America even though many Irish and German immigrants were Catholic Early colonists left England hoping to find new opportunities in America 6
At this time in the United States plans to construct hundreds of miles of roads and canals and thousands of miles of railroads had created an urgent demand for laborers Immigration increased from about 129,000 people during the 1820s to 2,814,554 during the 1850s more than a 20-fold increase The U S population grew from 23 2 million in 1850 to 31 5 million in 1860 with immigrants making up a third of the additional people Nearly half of those arriving in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish and more than a quarter were German Chinese laborers working on the transcontinental railroad used explosives to blast through the mountains of the American west The transcontinental railroad was built by the hands of European and Chinese immigrants from 1863 to 1869 7
