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This content resource is an interactive tour of Ellis Island. Students can explore different rooms in the main building at Ellis Island, and can view original photographs, listen to audio, or watch video.

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Ellis Island - The process that happend on the way to the registry room - medical examination.

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A New Surge of Growth | German | Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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German immigrants boarding a ship for America European Reading Room
German immigration boomed in the 19th century. Wars in Europe and America had slowed the arrival of immigrants for several decades starting in the 1770s, but by 1830 German immigration had increased more than tenfold. From that…

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A famine is when there is not enough food to feed all the people in a country or region. Many people may become ill or die because of famine. During the Famine of 1845-49 in...

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The Great Famine, Great Hunger, or Great Famine is the name given to the famine in Ireland in the years 1845-1852. Outside Ireland, it is usually called the Irish Potato Famine. The famine was caused by "the potato blight", a fungus-like organism which quickly destroyed the potatoes in Ireland, and throughout Europe. The effect was particularly bad in Ireland because potatoes were the staple food for most Irish people at the time.

It is believed that between 1 million to 1.5 million people died in the three years from 1846 to 1849 because of hunger or disease. Another million became refugees because of the famine. Many people who left Ireland moved to Great Britain, (mostly to the nearby town of Liverpool), the United States, Canada and Australia.

In Ireland this time is referred to as "the starvation". The potato was the only crop affected, yet Ireland continued to produce corn, wheat, barley, and beef. However, the mostly English landlords made a bigger profit by selling these food products elsewhere.

By the late 17th century, potatoes had become common as a supplementary rather than a major food. The diet was mainly around butter, milk, and grain products. Potato became a base food of the poor, especially in winter. The lack of genetic variability among the potato plants in Ireland caused the emergence of Phytophthora infestans which had devastating effects in Ireland. Another factor is that holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would be able to feed a family.

Starting in 1801, Ireland had been directly governed, under the Act of Union as part of the United Kingdom. In the 40 years after the union, British governments grappled with the problems of governing the country. One historian calculated that, between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees enquiring into the state of Ireland. "Without exception their findings prophesied disaster. Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low". It was caused by monoculture because they only planted one main crop and let its disease infest all other potatoes in the Irish territory.

Images for kids

An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c.  1847

Suggested paths of migration and diversification of P. infestans lineages HERB-1 and US-1

Rioters in Dungarvan attempt to break into a bakery; the poor could not afford to buy what food was available. ( The Pictorial Times, 1846).

An 1849 depiction of Bridget O'Donnell and her two children during the famine

Lord Palmerston, then British Foreign Secretary, evicted some 2,000 of his tenants.

The Emigrants' Farewell, engraving by Henry Doyle (1827-1893), from Mary Frances Cusack's Illustrated History of Ireland, 1868

Irish population in the United States, 1880

Political cartoon from the 1880s: "In forty years I have lost, through the operation of no natural law, more than Three Million of my Sons and Daughters, and they, the Young and the Strong, leaving behind the Old and Infirm to weep and to die. Where is this to end?"

In Spanish: Gran hambruna irlandesa para niños

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Learn Irish Potato Famine facts for kids

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While New York City ushered in the arrival of 1892 with the peals of church bells and the screeching of horns, American dreams danced in the head of a 17-year-old Irish girl anchored off the southern tip of Manhattan. Along with her two younger brothers, the teenager had departed Queenstown, Ireland, on December 20, 1891, aboard the steamship Nevada to start a new life in a new land. After spending 12 days, including Christmas, at sea, the girl from Ireland's County Cork was just hours away from reuniting with her parents and two older siblings after spending the past four years apart.

Nevada had arrived too late on New Year's Eve to be processed, which meant its third-class passengers would be the first to pass through the newly built federal immigration station on Ellis Island, which had previously been used as a gunpowder storage facility for the U.S. Navy.

At 10:30 a.m. on New Year's Day, a flag on Ellis Island was dipped three times as a signal to transport the first boatload of immigrants. A chorus of foghorns, clanging bells, steam whistles and cheers serenaded a barge adorned with red, white and blue bunting as it ferried Nevada's steerage passengers to the dock at Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

The brown-haired Irish teenager was the first to bound down the gangplank with her brothers in tow. She entered through the enormous double doors of the cavernous three-story wooden building, described as "little more than a big business shed" by the New York Tribune, and skipped two steps at a time up the main staircase. Turning to her left, the girl was ushered into one of 10 aisles and up to a tall lectern-like registry desk.

"What is your name, my girl?" asked Charles Hendley, a former Treasury Department official who had requested the honor of registering the new station's first immigrant.

"Annie Moore, sir," replied the Irish girl.

Wielding his pen over a fresh piece of paper, Hendley inked Moore's name and those of her brothers, Anthony and Philip, along with their ages, last place of residence and intended destination on the first page of the first registry book. Annie was then escorted into the next room where former congressman John B. Weber, federal superintendent of immigration for the port of New York, gave her a ten-dollar gold piece and wishes for a Happy New Year. A Catholic chaplain blessed her and gave her a silver coin, while another bystander slipped her a five-dollar gold piece before she passed into the waiting room and the arms of her parents. Over the course of the next 62 years, more than 12 million immigrants would follow in the teenager's footsteps through Ellis Island, and it's estimated that 40 percent of the country can trace its origins back to the immigration station in New York Harbor.

Why Moore was the first of the 107 immigrants in Nevada's steerage to be processed at Ellis Island is not known. In one story, an Italian gave up his place at the front of the line after seeing her in tears. In another, a large German man had one foot on the gangplank when a sailor held him back and called out "Ladies First!" while pushing Moore ahead.

As Tyler Anbinder notes in his new book, "City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York," Irish immigrants such as Moore composed just a small portion of the passengers aboard Nevada. Although there were twice as many immigrants from southern and eastern Europe-primarily Italian and Russian Jews-aboard the ship as those from western Europe, an English-speaking, "rosy-cheeked" Irish lass was a typecast poster child for immigration at a time when Irish immigrants had already risen to the heights of American political and cultural life. Always seeking a good story, newspapers reported that Moore's birthday was fortuitously on January 1. It wasn't, and she wasn't 15 as newspapers also reported-although Moore may have given that age herself to save money on the passage.

Following her brief moment of notoriety, Moore dissolved into oblivion. Not until decades after her death and the closure of Ellis Island was her memory resurrected as the immigration station underwent the largest historic restoration in U.S. history during the 1980s. Moore became the public face of the immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island, but it turned out that the face put forward was a case of mistaken identity.

For years it was thought that Moore had married a descendant of the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, moved to New Mexico and met a tragic end in a 1923 streetcar accident in Fort Worth, Texas, that left her five children orphaned. For years, the woman's descendants were invited to ceremonies at both Ellis Island and Ireland.

It was discovered in 2006, however, that the Annie Moore who died in the streetcar accident was born and raised in the United States. Genealogist Megan Smolenyak and New York City's commissioner of records, Brian Andersson, found that the Annie Moore who passed through Ellis Island lived her entire life in a few square blocks on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "She had the typical hardscrabble immigrant life," Smolenyak told the New York Times in 2006. Moore married Joseph Augustus Schayer, a German-American who worked at the Fulton Fish Market, and gave birth to at least 10 children, five of whom died before the age of three. The family had enough money for a family plot, but Moore's children were buried without headstones, as was she after her death from heart failure in 1924 at the age of 50. Moore was an enormous woman, and according to family lore her casket was too big to squeeze down the narrow apartment staircase, so it had to be transported out of a window.

The massive wooden immigration station that Moore passed through in 1892 was completely consumed by a fire on June 15, 1897. The blaze was not lethal, but it destroyed the collection of leather-bound registry books listing every immigrant who had landed in New York City since 1855, including the name of Annie Moore. Today, a pair of statues of Moore and her brothers stand at the Irish port of Cobh (the present-day name of Queenstown) and on Ellis Island, where their trans-Atlantic journey began and ended.

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Remembering Annie Moore, Ellis Island's First Immigrant | HISTORY

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On the anniversary of the opening of Ellis Island, learn about the first foreigner who passed through its doors, 17-year-old Irish immigrant Annie Moore.

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Media Credits

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Immigration to the U.S. in the Late 1800s | National Geographic Society

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Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Source other

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings-many of them concentrated in the city's Lower East Side neighborhood-were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation. By 1900, some 2.3 million people (a full two-thirds of New York City's population) were living in tenement housing.

The Rise of Tenement Housing

In the first half of the 19th century, many of the more affluent residents of New York's Lower East Side neighborhood began to move further north, leaving their low-rise masonry row houses behind. At the same time, more and more immigrants began to flow into the city, many of them fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, or Great Hunger, in Ireland or revolution in Germany. Both of these groups of new arrivals concentrated themselves on the Lower East Side, moving into row houses that had been converted from single-family dwellings into multiple-apartment tenements, or into new tenement housing built specifically for that purpose.

Did you know? By 1900, more than 80,000 tenements had been built in New York City. They housed a population of 2.3 million people, a full two-thirds of the city's total population of around 3.4 million.

A typical tenement building had five to seven stories and occupied nearly all of the lot upon which it was built (usually 25 feet wide and 100 feet long, according to existing city regulations). Many tenements began as single-family dwellings, and many older structures were converted into tenements by adding floors on top or by building more space in rear-yard areas. With less than a foot of space between buildings, little air and light could get in.

In many tenements, only the rooms on the street got any light, and the interior rooms had no ventilation (unless air shafts were built directly into the room). Later, speculators began building new tenements, often using cheap materials and construction shortcuts. Even new, this kind of housing was at best uncomfortable and at worst highly unsafe.

Calls for Reform

New York was not the only city in America where tenement housing emerged as a way to accommodate a growing population during the 1900s. In Chicago, for example, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 led to restrictions on building wood-frame structures in the center of the city and encouraged the construction of lower-income dwellings on the city's outskirts.

Unlike in New York, where tenements were highly concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, in Chicago they tended to cluster around centers of employment, such as stockyards and slaughterhouses. Nowhere, however, did the tenement situation become as dire as it was in New York, particularly on the Lower East Side. A cholera epidemic in 1849 took some 5,000 lives, many of them poor people living in overcrowded housing.

During the infamous New York draft riots that tore apart the city in 1863, rioters were not only protesting against the new military conscription policy; they were also reacting to the intolerable conditions in which many of them were living. The Tenement House Act of 1867 legally defined a tenement for the first time and set construction regulations; among these were the requirement of one toilet (or privy) per 20 people.

"How the Other Half Lives"

The existence of tenement legislation did not guarantee its enforcement, however, and conditions were little improved by 1889, when the Danish-born author and photographer Jacob Riis was researching the series of newspaper articles that would become his seminal book "How the Other Half Lives."

Riis had experienced firsthand the hardship of immigrant life in New York City, and as a police reporter for newspapers, including The Evening Sun, he had gotten a unique view into the grimy, crime-infested world of the Lower East Side. Seeking to draw attention to the horrible conditions in which many urban Americans were living, Riis photographed what he saw in the tenements and used these vivid photos to accompany the text of "How the Other Half Lives," published in 1890.

The hard facts included in Riis' book-such as the fact that 12 adults slept in a room some 13 feet across, and that the infant death rate in the tenements was as high as 1 in 10-stunned many in America and around the world and led to a renewed call for reform.

Two major studies of tenements were completed in the 1890s, and in 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law-which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced-pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities.

Life After the Tenements

By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects. The next decade saw the implementation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which would transform low-income housing in many American cities through programs including slum clearing and the building of public housing.

The first fully government-built public housing project opened in New York City in 1936. Called First Houses, it consisted of a number of rehabilitated pre-law tenements covering a partial block at Avenue A and East 3rd Street, an area that had been considered part of the Lower East Side.

Among the trendy restaurants, boutique hotels and bars that can be found in the neighborhood today, visitors can still get a glimpse into its past at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 Orchard Street.

Built in 1863, the building is an example of an "old-law" tenement (as defined by the Tenement House Act of 1867) and was home over the years for some 7,000 working class immigrants. Though the basement and the first floor have been renovated, the rest of the building looks much the same as it did in the 19th century, and has been designated a National Historic Site.

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We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America's cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City-where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880-buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population.

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History of Sweatshops: 1880-1940 Tenement Sweatshops Women finishing pants, New York City, around 1900 Photographer: Jacob Riis. Courtesy Museum of the City of New York Emanating from crowded tenements, lofts, and row houses, the whir of sewing machines added to the din of urban life. In many ci…

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Table of Contents

Angel Island Immigration Station, formally United States Immigration Station at Angel Island, the principal immigration facility on the West Coast of the United States from 1910 to 1940. Angel Island encompasses an area of about 740 acres (300 hectares) and is located in San Francisco Bay, California, near Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, between 1.25 miles (2 km) and 1.5 miles (2.5 km) north of San Francisco. It functioned as both an immigration and deportation facility, at which some 175,000 Chinese and about 60,000 Japanese immigrants were detained under oppressive conditions, generally from two weeks to six months, before being allowed to enter the United States.

Having served successively as a hunting and fishing ground for the Miwok people, a private cattle ranch, a military base and embarkation point, as well as a quarantine station, Angel Island replaced a congested structure on a pier in San Francisco as the West Coast's main immigration facility in 1910. Unlike Ellis Island, where Europeans were subject to restrictions that precluded entrance for some but not most immigrants, the Angel Island Immigration Station employed discriminatory policies that were used to prevent Asians from immigrating. This approach was an outgrowth and implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which had resulted from years of racial hostility by white Americans against immigrant Chinese labourers.

Passengers arriving in San Francisco were screened aboard ship and separated by nationality. Europeans and first-class passengers were generally permitted immediate entrance to the city. Asians-along with some other immigrant groups (notably Mexicans and Russians) as well as those thought to require medical quarantine-were ferried to Angel Island. Because the Exclusion Act and its revisions limited Chinese immigration to certain skilled occupations while also allowing entrance to the children of U.S. citizens, elaborate steps were taken by Chinese immigrants to masquerade as practitioners of qualifying vocations or as the " paper sons" and "paper daughters" of Chinese Americans. The immigration authorities' rigorous efforts to expose fraud resulted in protracted, exhaustive interrogations and related interviews of corroborating parties that sometimes kept the immigrants captive on the island for weeks or months. Boards of Special Inquiry grilled immigrants on minutiae related to their stated occupations, families, or hometowns. The immigrants were also subjected to extensive physical examinations that violated their cultural norms.

The station's location on the island was intended to keep the detainees isolated and was thought to be escape-proof. Before long the Angel Island facility also became a deportation centre for those already in the country in violation of the Exclusion Act. The station comprised some 45 purpose-built structures, including a hospital, a laboratory, barracks, a laundry, and a two-story bathhouse. When the main administration building was destroyed by fire in 1940, the immigration facility was relocated to the mainland. In 1954 a small part of the island became a California state park, with land added to the park between then and 1963, after which point the park's boundaries encompassed nearly the whole island.

Jeff Wallenfeldt

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Angel Island Immigration Station | History & Facts

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Angel Island Immigration Station, formally United States Immigration Station at Angel Island, the principal immigration facility on the West Coast of the United States from 1910 to 1940. Angel Island encompasses an area of about 740 acres (300 hectares) and is located in San Francisco Bay, California, near Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, between 1.25 miles (2 km) and 1.5 miles (2.5 km) north of San Francisco.

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Kids learn about the Statue of Liberty including how it was made, what it represents, the design and symbolism, how tall she is, and interesting facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

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Kids learn about the immigration station Ellis Island near New York City including when it opened, how many people came through Ellis Island, passing inspections, and interesting facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

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Newsela | Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts

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As many Chinese workers came to the U.S. in the 1800s, attitudes against them grew and led to the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep them out.

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Newsela | Time Machine (1892): The first immigrants arrive at Ellis Island