Immigrants In 17th Century United States

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many people moved about within Europe as crossed the Atlantic. America benefited from these people churning changes but did not set then all in motion. Nor was the United States the sole beneficiary of the process : of the nearly 60 million people who abandoned Europe in the century after 1840, about 25 million went somewhere other than the United States. Yet America still beckoned most strongly to the struggling masses of Europe, and the majority of migrants headed for the "land of freedom and opportunity". There was freedom from aristocratic caste and state church; there was abundant opportunity to secure broad acres and better one’s condition. The introduction of transoceanic steam ships also meant that the immigrants could come speedily, in a matter of ten or twelve clays instead of ten or twelve weeks.
For a generation, from 1793 to 1815, war raged across Europe. Ruinous as it was on the continent, the fighting brought unprecedented prosperity to the long-suffering landsmen of ...

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potato famine hardly guaranteed a long life to and Irish-American most of the new arrivals toiled as day laborers. A fortunate few owned boarding houses or saloons, where their dispirited countrymen sought solace in the bottle. For Irish-born women, opportunities were still scarcer; they worked mainly as domestic servants. But it was their Roman Catholicism, more even than their penury or their perceived fondness for alcohol, that earned the Irish the distrust and resentment of their native-born, Protestant American neighbors. The cornerstone of social and religious life for Irish immigrants was the parish. Worries about safeguarding their children’s faith inspired the construction of ...

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