Account for the making of the multi-ethnic American city from the 1880s to the 1920s.

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 Account for the making of the multi-ethnic American city  from the 1880s to the 1920s.

The United States has always been a nation made up of many nationalities. In little more than two hundred years of its existence, it has taken more than 55 million people, from nearly every corner of the world. People of different countries have brought varied ideas about religion, politics, tradition, and custom to American shores.

At the beginning of the twentieth century a Jew immigrant from England, Israel Zangwill, wrote a play entitled "The Melting Pot". Its message still holds a tremendous power on the American imagination – the promise that all immigrants can be transformed into Americans, a new alloy forged in a crucible of democracy, freedom and civic responsibility. The term melting pot refers to the idea that societies formed by immigrant cultures, religions, end ethnic groups, will produce new hybrid social and cultural forms. The notion comes from the pot in which metals are melted into new compound, with great strength and other combined advantages. In comparison with assimilation, it implies the ability of new or subordinate groups to affect the values of the dominant group. Although the term melting pot may be applied to many countries in the world, mostly referring to increased level of mixed race and culture, it is predominantly used with reference to United States and the creation of the American nation, as a distinct “new breed of people” amalgamated from many various groups of immigrants. In 1908, when Zangwill’s play opened in Washington, the United States was in the middle of absorbing the largest influx of immigrants in its history – Irish and Germans, followed by Italians and eastern Europeans, Catholics and Jews – some 18 million new citizens between 1890 and 1920. However, even if America has always been referred to as the home of the free and the brave - a place where liberty comes first above all else, this inviting "melting pot" image can be challenged. Many insist that America is more of a “salad bowl” where cultures do not mix; instead they live as distinct factions within a foreign world.

The country has had three major periods of immigration. The first wave began with the colonists of the 1600's and reached a peak just before the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775. The second major flow of immigrants started in the 1820's and lasted until a depression in the early 1860's. Immigration declined during the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) but increased once more by 1870. The late nineteenth century was one of the great ages of immigration in American history. This era of immigration differed from previous immigration booms in two key respects: scale and sources. In many ways, the change in sources of immigration was more important than the change in scale. By far the largest sources of immigrants in the period were the nations of central, eastern, and southern Europe. These immigrants were refugees from economic privation and political and religious persecution in the empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia and the new, fragile nations of Italy and Germany.

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This also was the first great period of Asian immigration to America, mostly from China but with a trickle of immigrants from Japan and Korea as well. However, anti-Asian feeling in the western United States limited both the extent of Asian immigration and the degree to which the Asian immigrants could take full advantage of the opportunities available to their white neighbours.

 

The growth of immigration in this period was spurred, as were so many other social phenomena, by technology. The development of ocean-going steamships and the rise of a great trans-oceanic trade spanning the Atlantic and ...

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