Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. We’ve been going through Unit 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and in this video and the next we’re going to consider the huge movements of immigrants and migrants into and around the United States during this period. So get them brain cows squarely stationed in the milking trough, and let’s get to it. So what we’re aiming to accomplish in this video is to explain how cultural and economic factors affected migration patterns over time. So first, we need to make a distinction between immigration and migration. They sound like the same thing, but they’re not. Immigration is when a group of folks moves from one country to another. Migration is when a group of folks moves WITHIN the same country from region to region. And during the period from 1865-1898 both kinds of movements occurred in the United States, so let’s look at both. First, immigration. In the last part of the 19th century, the U.S. population grew by a multiple of three. Now some of that population explosion was due to baby-making, but a large portion of it was due to a massive wave of immigrants arriving on the AMerican shores, something like 16 million of them. Now mainly these immigrants arrived from Europe, especially from the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Europe. In general, they left Europe because of the growing poverty there, overcrowding, and joblessness. Some, like the Jews in Eastern Europe, immigrated to flee religious persecution. Other immigrants showed up from Russia, Italy, and the Balkans as well. But no matter where they came from, they largely settled in industrial cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. To them, American seemed to be a land of opportunity, and thus the industrial workforce became far more diverse with all these new folks. Now this was mainly a phenomenon on the Eastern coast of America. But over in the West, immigrants from Asia, largely Chinese people, flooded in as well. Chinese immigrants had been arriving since the California Gold Rush days in the 1840s and 1850s. And during this period Asian immigrants continued to arrive in substantial numbers. Now as a result of all these new kinds of people flooding into industrial cities, the cities themselves began to change. In the days before the Civil War, people from different social classes lived together in the cities. But during the Gilded Age, the middle class and the wealthy did a little migrating of their own, leaving behind the cities and moving away from the urban hustle. That meant that the industrial cities were largely made up of the working class and the urban poor, many of them immigrants. And in the cities where this bifurcation occurred, the working class districts became all kinds of squalid. Immigrants and other members of the working class crowded into hastily built tenements which were poorly constructed and poorly ventilated. And in addition to the depressing condition of such living spaces, the residents’ close proximity to one another assured frequent outbreaks of disease like cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Immigrants from the same cultures did find each other and established ethnic enclaves where they found a sense of solidarity with one another and re-established some of their cultural institutions. Irish immigrants established Catholic Churches, and Eastern European Jews built synagogues. Immigrant groups established banking institutions where they could deposit their earnings and political organizations that fought for immigrant rights. On a smaller scale, some immigrants opened urban grocery stores that sold food reminiscent of their homeland. And in all those ways, immigrants established their own culture among the pressing difficulty of industrial urban life. Okay, now that we’ve talked about immigration during this period, let’s switch gears and talk about migration, and one of the most significant migrations during this period was known as the Exoduster Movement which was a mass migration of Southern black people into the west. As I mentioned in another video, the end of Reconstruction in the South meant that the black population was left to fend for themselves without federal protection of their rights. And as terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan grew and Jim Crow laws segregated southern society and disenfranchised black folks wholesale, they began to seek accommodation elsewhere. And so starting in the late 1870s, something like 40,000 black southerners abandoned the South and migrated to Kansas mainly, but also in Oklahoma and Colorado. Several organizations were created to assist them in this movement including the Colored Relief Board and the Kansas Freedmen’s Aid Society. The Exodusters who were most successful upon arrival were the ones who settled in the urban centers of Kansas and got work as domestic servants or trade workers. However, many of the Exodusters attempted to carve out homesteads in what little land was left in Kansas after railroad speculators had gobbled up all the best farmland to build railways. And as a result, the vast majority of black homesteaders were still in destitution a year after they had moved from the South. Now in talking about immigration during this period it’s been hard to resist talking about the responses to all these new people settling in America, but that is the subject of the next video, so I’ll see you in that one. Alright, that’s what you need to know about Unit 6 topic 8 of the AP U.S. History Curriculum. 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