The Great Wave

The period of American history beginning in 1870 was a period not only of massive industrial expansion but also of massive immigration, on a scale unlike anything seen before in American history. Immigration had, of course, always been a theme of American history, and the idea of America as an asylum for the world, a land of hope, had been firmly in place even before the nation’s founding. What were the New England Puritans, after all, but a group of hope filled immigrants seeking their Zion in the American wilderness? What was different about this new immigration was not only its scale but its ethnic and religious character.