New Orleans was one of the most important ports of entry for immigration to the United States during the 19th century, mainly because of its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River, which provided ready access to the interior of country.
Read the full storyFrom its earliest days, New Amsterdam, the precursor to New York City, was one of the most heterogeneous places on earth.
Read the full storyNew Amsterdam, conquered by England in 1664, was the heart of the Dutch commercial empire in North America (New Netherland).
Read the full storyAs a result of an ongoing and integral U.S. involvement with the politics of Nicaragua from the 1850s, a unique set of circumstances has brought a variety of Nicaraguan immigrants to the United States.
Read the full storyNigeria is the number one source country for West African immigrants coming to the United States and is second to Ghana for immigration to Canada.
Read the full storyThe North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 created a unified market of more than 370 million people with goods and services totaling $6.5 trillion annually.
Read the full storyThe North West Company was, according to journalist and historian Peter Newman, “the first North American business to operate on a continental scale.”
Read the full storyNorway was the number one source country for Scandinavian immigration to North America, and second only to famine-ravaged Ireland in percentage of its population to immigrate.
Read the full storyThe peninsula of Nova Scotia was a continual source of conflict between France and Britain from the establishment of its first settlement by France at Port Royal (1605) until France was driven completely from North America in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
Read the full storyThe Oregon Country was a huge expanse of lightly inhabited territory north of Mexican California, south of Russian Alaska, and southwest of the British trapping lands of the Athabasca Country.
Read the full storyThe Oriental Exclusion Act, actually a special provision of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, excluded immigrants who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship from entrance to the United States, even at the new ethnic-based, lower levels.
Read the full storyJosiah Strong’s influential 1885 polemic, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, represented both America’s sense of manifest destiny and nativist fears as the new immigration began to bring hundreds of thousands of eastern and southern Europeans into the country.
Read the full storyIn this dramatic court case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Japanese were not white and therefore could not be naturalized as U.S. citizens.
Read the full storyThe islands of the vast Pacific Ocean stretch over thousands of miles but have a small total population.
Read the full storyA padrone (from the Italian padroni for “patrons” or “bosses”) was a middleman in the labor trade, helping poor immigrants obtain transportation to North America, jobs upon arrival, and basic needs in an alien society.
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