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Migration to the US in the early 20th century
Rise of slums essay
Rise of slums essay
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Recommended: Migration to the US in the early 20th century
Immigration into the United States has been a motivating factor in a large population growth emerging from the slums of urban areas such as New York and Chicago, which has created a huge cultural absorption that has impacted the history of the United States. Throughout Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925, David Ward’s attempts to explore the negative and what some would call incorrect views and beliefs that many Americans have regarding the slums, the ghettos and the impoverished immigrant lifestyles. The American interpretation of these poverty stricken areas throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century in contrast to today and the way Americans view ghettos and the inner city. He finishes stating that the slums became temporary residences for migrants, and were no longer synonymous with simply impoverished immigrants and even “native” citizens.
According to Ward, the earliest use of the term slum expressed the anxieties about negative consequences of industrialization such as environmental pollution and housing congestion. These weren’t necessarily a result of urban employment but rather the scale at which industrialization changed these developments and the size of urban communities (1). In other words, immigration wasn’t the lone factor in creating the scare of slum lifestyles, but rather the rate at which industrialization accelerated immigration and the increasingly poverty-stricken citizens of the inner city.
As cited from Thomas Kessner, Ward continues stating that in attempts to classify the poor without admitting to the endemic nature of poverty the poor are separated into two groups: the worthy and the unworthy. The worthy are in poverty because of family illness or some other misfortune,...
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... topic will be drawn in an immersed in his findings? Again, unlikely, but rarely are any scholarly works such as this so fortunate. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with Ward’s book, if there were one area in which he could improve upon, it would be his excitement factor.
The information is there, the credibility is there and Ward uses excellent diction to keep the readers attention throughout his book, but never once over the course of 217 pages does any piece of information truly jump out at you. People looking to become well informed on impoverished immigrant lifestyles from the nineteenth to twentieth centuties will be hard pressed to find a book more informational and accessible as Ward’s, but those unfamiliar with the topic who are looking for new and interesting information may be left sorely unimpressed with the lack of thought provoking content.
Many of these ethnic groups still reside where their relatives first lived when they arrived many years ago, whereas a majority of the ethnic groups have dispersed all over the Chicago land area, creating many culturally mixed neighborhoods. Ultimately, all of these ethnic groups found their rightful area in which they belong in Chicago. To this day, the areas in Chicago that the different ethnic immigrants moved to back in the 1920s are very much so the same. These immigrants have a deep impact on the development of neighborhoods in today’s society. Without the immigrants’ hard work and their ambition to establish a life for their families and their future, Chicago would not be as developed and defined as it is now.
Prior to this, I had never heard of any benefit of gentrification; rather, I had the typical preconceived notion that Freeman discusses: gentrification is a demonic force that inflicts suffering in all poor people in a gentrified neighborhood. However, reading excerpts from “There Goes the ‘Hood” encourages me to rethink my position. One of my questions from the reading pertains to the “race” part of the author’s argument. Although Clinton Hill and Harlem are both predominantly comprised of African Americans, I wonder how low-income white residents feel about gentrification. I am curious about this because a friend of mine, a white Irish, was displaced from her home in Sunnyside, Queens last summer because of increasing rent. From this experience, I think that seeing low-income whites’ outlooks on white gentry would be interesting. Furthermore, I question the validity of the author’s selection on some of the participants for his interview, particularly those whom he recruited in a conference on gentrification (page 12). One could imagine that community members who attend such a conference would hold strong opinions about gentrification. However, would not this contradict his earlier point that “the most active and vocal residents are not necessarily representative of the entire neighborhood and are likely different” (page 7) and thus undermining the integrity of some of his
Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto paints a grim picture of inevitability for the once-exclusive neighborhood of Harlem, New York. Ososfky’s timeframe is set in 1890-1930 and his study is split up into three parts. His analysis is convincing in explaining the social and economic reasons why Harlem became the slum that it is widely infamous for today, but he fails to highlight many of the positive aspects of the enduring neighborhood, and the lack of political analysis in the book is troubling.
A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 explains in detail how the author deciphers the ghettoization process in Cleveland during the time period. Kusmer also tries to include studies that mainly pertained to specific black communities such as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, which strongly emphasized the institutional ghetto and dwelled on white hostility as the main reasons as to why the black ghetto was
Immigration has existed around the world for centuries, decades, and included hundreds of cultures. Tired of poverty, a lack of opportunities, unequal treatment, political corruption, and lacking any choice, many decided to emigrate from their country of birth to seek new opportunities and a new and better life in another country, to settle a future for their families, to work hard and earn a place in life. As the nation of the opportunities, land of the dreams, and because of its foundation of a better, more equal world for all, the United States of America has been a point of hope for many of those people. A lot of nationals around the world have ended their research for a place to call home in the United States of America. By analyzing primary sources and the secondary sources to back up the information, one could find out about what Chinese, Italians, Swedish, and Vietnamese immigrants have experienced in the United States in different time periods from 1865 to 1990.
A well-discussed debate in today’s economy is the issues concerning immigrants and their yearning desire to become American citizens. As displayed in The Jungle, a rather perturbing novel about the trials and ruthless temptations early America presents to a Lithuanian family, adjusting to a new surroundings and a new way of life is quite difficult. To make matters worse, language barriers and lack of domestic knowledge only seem to entice starvation and poverty among newly acquired citizens, who simply wish to change their social and economic lives to better themselves and their families. Such is the case of Jurgis Rudkus and his extended family, consisting of cousins, in-laws, and their multitude of children. Natives to the country of Lithuania, Jurgis and his family decide that, after Jurgis and his love, Ona, marry, they will move to Chicago to find work in order to support their family.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, legal and illegal, from around the world, come to the United States. These immigrants come because they want a chance at a better life; others are refugees, escaping persecution and civil wars in their home country. Many people believe the United States is the best place to go. There is more freedom, protection, and benefits, which seems like a good deal to immigrants. But the large number of immigration is affecting the current citizens of the United States. Taxpayers are forced to pay for the welfare and schooling for many of these immigrants, some who are illegal aliens. Some citizens believe that immigration can be hazardous to the environment. Others blame crime, poverty, and overpopulation on immigration. About sixty-eight million immigrants have been added to the United States since 1970, and it is estimated that 130 million people will be added over the next fifty years. The government has tried somewhat to restrict immigration but the laws are still too lenient. Nearly every other advanced country in the world is moving quickly towards stabilized population or has already achieved it. The United States is moving towards it very slowly. This country would have to reduce immigration down to 255,000 a year to do this (Beck 1). If nothing is done to stabilize the immigration to this country, what will become of population in the next decade? The population will continue to grow even faster - not due to births, but to massive immigration to this country. Immigration can become a serious problem to this country if the government does not produce stricter laws.
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
In The Promised Land, Nicholas Lehmann follows the stories of black migrants, politicians, and bureaucrats through the Great Migration, and attempts to explain the decline of northern cities, the constant liberty struggle of blacks across America, and government response to the issues surrounding the Great Migration. This work signalled a drastic change from the structured approach of Thomas Sugrue’s, The Origins Of The Urban Crisis, which observes the effects of institutions and human agency on postwar Detroit and its marginalized peoples. Both Sugrue and Lemann had (albeit slightly different) holistic views of the political climate of postwar cities, which helped provide context for prejudices towards blacks and the poor, and subsequently
Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Immigrant America: A Portrait.” Kiniry and Rose 336-337. Print.
Gollab, Caroline. The Impact of Industrial Experience on the Immigrant Family: The Huddled Masses Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977.
In contrast to the negatives of gentrification, some people view gentrification as a the only effective way to “revitalize” low-income urban communities. In the article, “Gentrification: A Positive Good For Communities” Turman situates the piece around the opinion that gentrification is not as awful as the negative connotation surrounding it. Furthermore, he attempts to dispel the negative aspects of gentrification by pointing out how some of them are nonexistent. To accomplish this, Turman exemplifies how gentrification could positively impact neighborhoods like Third Ward (a ‘dangerous’ neighborhood in Houston, Texas).Throughout the article, Turman provides copious examples of how gentrification can positively change urban communities, expressing that “gentrification can produce desirable effects upon a community such as a reduced crime rate, investment in the infrastructure of an area and increased economic activity in neighborhoods which gentrify”. Furthermore, he opportunistically uses the Third Ward as an example, which he describes as “the 15th most dangerous neighborhood in the country” and “synonymous with crime”, as an example of an area that could “need the change that gentrification provides”. Consequently, he argues with
“They are willing to sell themselves in order to find a better life for themselves or
The United States of America is the best place for immigration. The history proved that the United States was the dream land, the place of chances. That started when Europeans escaped form their countries because there were no jobs and no safe places to live. America became the best choice for people who were looking for political asylum, jobs, or freedom, but after a few generations something changed the Americans look to immigrants as strangers and they forgot where they are from because America is multicultural place and immigration movement should be understandable, but this is not the case. Governments should develop good laws for immigrants by giving rights to immigrants to stay in America, to protect them, and to allow people who deserve to come to America.
In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.