Term | Definition |
urbanization | the movement of populations from the countryside (rural) to the cities & towns (urban) |
demography | the population distribution in a region |
McCormick Reaper | machinery that cut & bundled grain faster, which reduced the number of farm jobs needed |
municipal /municipality | city-based / city |
tenements | crowded single-room apartments without heating or lighting where many immigrant families were packed |
political machines | organizations like Tammany Hall helped immigrants settle in cities with jobs & housing, but stole govt. money from contracts and bribery |
Boss Tweed | head of the NYC political machine who used support from Irish immigrants to bribe lawmakers to pass laws favorable to his self interest |
push factors | poverty, war, religious persecution |
pull factors | jobs, land, political/religious freedom |
New Immigrants | unskilled workers from southern & eastern Europe of Catholic, Orthodox, & Jewish backgrounds who faced discrimination from nativist groups in the US |
Ellis Island | the immigration processing center on the East Coast where the Statue of Liberty is |
Ethnic Ghettos | urban neighborhoods where new immigrants settled with those from the same background. They felt comforted by being able to speak the same language & follow same customs: Little Italy, Chinatown |
assimilated | immigrants learned to speak, dress, and act like the general population to be part of the "melting pot" of America |
nativists/nativism | opponents of immigration on the grounds that the New Immigrants were inferior to Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that they took jobs and lowered wages for native-born workers |
Chinese Exclusion Act | Law passed in 1882 was the first to restrict immigration based on anti-Asian prejudices in California by whites who saw them as an economic threat |
frontier | the line separating the technologically advanced American settlements from Native people's lands; by 1890 the frontier was closed with the help of the Transcontinental RR and the Reservation System |
Homestead Act | land grants by the federal govt. intended to encourage settlement of the West by immigrants, that gave 160 acres to a family if they farmed for 5 years in the Great Plains region |
open range | open, unfenced land where cowboys could drive cattle to graze on their way to the rail lines in Kansas |
reservation | wastelands where Native groups were forced to live as farmers by the federal govt. to clear the plains for the Transcontinental RR & farmers |
Dawes Act | attempt to assimilate Natives by breaking up tribal lands into individual parcels of private property and citizenship. Whites bought up 2/3 of communal land, nearly destroying Native society |
American Citizenship Act-1924 | as a reward for military service in WWI, this law granted citizenship to all Natives born in the US |
barbed wire | steel wire with sharp edges invented and used by farmers to fence off and mark their land to keep cattle & sheep grazers off their property; ended the open range |