Zócalo Public SquareThe ‘Hot, Foul, Sultry Air’ of Ellis Island – Zócalo Public Square https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org Ideas Journalism With a Head and a Heart Mon, 21 Oct 2024 07:01:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 The ‘Hot, Foul, Sultry Air’ of Ellis Island https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/10/17/the-hot-foul-sultry-air-of-ellis-island/books/squaring-off/ https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/10/17/the-hot-foul-sultry-air-of-ellis-island/books/squaring-off/#respond Fri, 17 Oct 2014 07:01:26 +0000 Zocalo https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/?p=56175 Immigrants arrive in the U.S. today at thousands of entry points, by plane, boat, car, and foot. But for decades at the turn of the 20th century, the harbor at Ellis Island was the main gateway to America. The recently erected Statue of Liberty welcomed these huddled masses, and the hive of activity that was New York City buzzed just beyond. In the Great Hall, as immigrants awaited processing with their life’s belongings in their hands, anxious and excited voices in Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, Yiddish, French, Greek, Swedish, and other languages bubbled up to the ceiling. The heyday of Ellis Island—1892 to 1924—is the subject of a new book by Ronald Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America. We posed five questions to Bayor, a Georgia Institute of Technology historian and former president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, about the essence of his book.

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]]> What It Means to Be AmericanImmigrants arrive in the U.S. today at thousands of entry points, by plane, boat, car, and foot. But for decades at the turn of the 20th century, the harbor at Ellis Island was the main gateway to America. The recently erected Statue of Liberty welcomed these huddled masses, and the hive of activity that was New York City buzzed just beyond. In the Great Hall, as immigrants awaited processing with their life’s belongings in their hands, anxious and excited voices in Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, Yiddish, French, Greek, Swedish, and other languages bubbled up to the ceiling.

The heyday of Ellis Island—1892 to 1924—is the subject of a new book by Ronald Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America. We posed five questions to Bayor, a Georgia Institute of Technology historian and former president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, about the essence of his book.

The post The ‘Hot, Foul, Sultry Air’ of Ellis Island appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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