Since 1776, millions of immigrants have landed at America's shores. To this day, their practical contributions are still felt in every field of endeavor, including agriculture, industry, and the service trades. But within the great immigrant waves there also came plucky and talented individualists, artists, and dreamers. Many of these exceptional folk went on to win worldly renown, and their names live on in history. Ellis Island's Famous Immigrants tells the story of some of the best known of these legendary characters and highlights their actual immigration experience at Ellis Island. Celebrities featured within its pages include such entrepreneurs as Max Factor, Charles Atlas, and "Chef Boyardee"; Hollywood icons Pola Negri, Bela Lugosi, and Bob Hope; spiritual figures Father Flanagan and Krishnamurti; authors Isaac Asimov and Kahlil Gibran; painters Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst; and sports figures Knute Rockne and Johnny Weissmuller.

Since 1776, millions of immigrants have landed at Americas shores. To this day, their practical contributions are still felt in every field of endeavor, including agriculture, industry, and the service trades. But within the great immigrant waves there also came plucky and talented individualists, artists, and dreamers. Many of these exceptional folk went on to win worldly renown, and their names live on in history. Ellis Islands Famous Immigrants tells the story of some of the best known of these legendary characters and highlights their actual immigration experience at Ellis Island. Celebrities featured within its pages include such entrepreneurs as Max Factor, Charles Atlas, and Chef Boyardee; Hollywood icons Pola Negri, Bela Lugosi, and Bob Hope; spiritual figures Father Flanagan and Krishnamurti; authors Isaac Asimov and Kahlil Gibran; painters Arshile Gorky and Max Ernst; and sports figures Knute Rockne and Johnny Weissmuller.

The story of the island where the immigrants went when they came to America looking for a better way of life and the museum that preserves these memories.

A landmark work of history that brings the voices of the past vividly to life, transforming our understanding of the immigrant's experience in America. Ellis Island. How many stories does this tiny patch of land hold? How many people had joyfully embarked on a new life here -- or known the despair of being turned away? How many were held there against their will? To tell its manifold stories, Ellis Islanddraws on unpublished testimonies, memoirs and correspondence from many internees and immigrants, including Russians, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Germans, and Poles, along with the commissioners, interpreters, doctors, and nurses who shepherded them -- all of whom knew they were taking part in a significant historical phenomenon. We see that deportations from Ellis Island were often based on pseudo-scientific ideas about race, gender, and disability. Sometimes, families were broken up, and new arrivals were held in detention at the Island for days, weeks, or months under quarantine. Indeed the island compound has spent longer as an internment camp than as a migration station. Today, the island is no less political. In popular culture, it is a romantic symbol of the generations of immigrants who reshaped the United States. But its true history reveals that today's fierce immigration debate has deep roots. Now a master storyteller brings its past to life, illustrated with unique archival photographs.

From 1892 to 1954, Ellis Island was the gateway to a new life in the United States for millions of immigrants. In later years, the island was deserted, the buildings decaying. Ellis Island was not restored until the 1980s, when Americans from all over the country donated more than $150 million. It opened to the public once again in 1990 as a museum. Learn more about America's history, and perhaps even your own, through the story of one of the most popular landmarks in the country.

We are a nation of immigrants. Even many of the faces we see on TV and in the news are recent immigrants. Meet these new Americans and learn their stories, whether they are athletes, musicians, artists, politicians, or businesspeople. Discover how all immigrants, along with natural-born American citizens, form a mosaic of different cultures and traditions.

The experiences of people coming to the United States from many different lands are conveyed in the words of a contemporary young girl visiting Ellis Island and of a girl who immigrated in about 1910, as well as by quotes from early twentieth century immigrants and Ellis Island officials.

Explores the immigrant's experiences and their pilgrimage of hope.

For most of New York's early history, Ellis Island had been an obscure little island that barely held itself above high tide. Today the small island stands alongside Plymouth Rock in our nation's founding mythology as the place where many of our ancestors first touched American soil. Ellis Island's heyday—from 1892 to 1924—coincided with one of the greatest mass movements of individuals the world has ever seen, with some twelve million immigrants inspected at its gates. In American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato masterfully illuminates the story of Ellis Island from the days when it hosted pirate hangings witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century when massive migrations sparked fierce debate and hopeful new immigrants often encountered corruption, harsh conditions, and political scheming. American Passage captures a time and a place unparalleled in American immigration and history, and articulates the dramatic and bittersweet accounts of the immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers who all play an important role in Ellis Island's chronicle. Cannato traces the politics, prejudices, and ideologies that surrounded the great immigration debate, to the shift from immigration to detention of aliens during World War II and the Cold War, all the way to the rebirth of the island as a national monument. Long after Ellis Island ceased to be the nation's preeminent immigrant inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it are still relevant to Americans a century later. In this sweeping, often heart-wrenching epic, Cannato reveals that the history of Ellis Island is ultimately the story of what it means to be an American.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of Ellis Island written by immigrants *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "So, anyhow, we had to get off of the ship, and we were put on a tender, which took us across to Ellis Island. And when I saw Ellis Island, it's a great big place, I wondered what we were going to do in there. And we all had to get out of the tender, and then into this, and gather your bags in there, and the place was crowded with people and talking, and crying, people were crying. And we passed, go through some of the halls there, and tried to remember that the halls, big halls, big open spaces there, and there was bars, and there was people behind these bars, and they were talking different languages, and I was scared to death. I thought I was in jail." - Mary Mullins, an Irish immigrant By the middle of the 19th century, New York City's population surpassed the unfathomable number of 1 million people, despite its obvious lack of space. This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. At first, the city itself set up its own immigration registration center in Castle Garden near the site of the original Fort Amsterdam, and naturally, many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel far and thus remained in New York. Of course, the addition of so many immigrants and others with less money put strains on the quality of life. Between 1862 and 1872, the number of tenements had risen from 12,000 to 20,000; the number of tenement residents grew from 380,000 to 600,000. One notorious tenement on the East River, Gotham Court, housed 700 people on a 20-by-200-foot lot. Another on the West Side was home, incredibly, to 3,000 residents, who made use of hundreds of privies dug into a fifteen-foot-wide inner court. Squalid, dark, crowded, and dangerous, tenement living created dreadful health and social conditions. It would take the efforts of reformers such as Jacob Riis, who documented the hellishness of tenements with shocking photographs in How the Other Half Lives, to change the way such buildings were constructed. On New Year's Day 1892, a young Irish girl named Annie Moore stepped off the steamship Nevada and landed on a tiny island that once held a naval fort. As she made her way through the large building on that island, Annie was processed as the first immigrant to come to America through Ellis Island. Like so many immigrants before her, she and her family settled in an Irish neighborhood in the city, and she would live out the rest of her days there. Thanks to the opening of Ellis Island near the end of the 19th century, immigration into New York City exploded, and the city's population nearly doubled in a decade. By the 1900s, 2 million people considered themselves New Yorkers, and Ellis Island would be responsible not just for that but for much of the influx of immigrants into the nation as a whole over the next half a century. To this day, about a third of the Big Apple's population is comprised of immigrants today, making it one of the most diverse cities in the world. Ellis Island: The History and Legacy of America's Most Famous Immigration Gateway analyzes the history of Ellis Island and its integral impact on American history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Ellis Island like never before, in no time at all.