AP U.S. History · Lesson 2

Immigration, cities and the West

Know Know it

Millions of immigrants arrived, at first mostly from Germany, Ireland and Scandinavia and, from the 1880s, increasingly from southern and eastern Europe (the new immigrants). Most settled in cities and took factory jobs. Cities grew fast and crowded: tenements, disease and fire were common. Political machines such as Tammany Hall traded jobs and help for votes, and reformers opened settlement houses, such as Jane Addams's Hull House (1889).

Many native-born Americans responded with nativism. Chinese immigrants on the West Coast faced riots and laws aimed at them, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) barred Chinese laborers. Catholic and Jewish newcomers met suspicion, yet they built their own churches, synagogues, newspapers and mutual aid societies.

In the West, the Homestead Act (1862), railroads and mining drew settlers. Cattle drives and ranching spread across the Plains, and mining booms created towns like Virginia City, Nevada. Hunters slaughtered the buffalo the Plains nations relied on. Wars followed as the army forced Native nations onto reservations: the Lakota and Cheyenne defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn (1876), but the army won in the end. The killing at Wounded Knee (1890) marked the end of large-scale armed resistance.

Federal policy turned to assimilation. The Dawes Act (1887) broke reservations into individual allotments and sold the "surplus" to settlers, and boarding schools tried to erase Native languages and cultures. Native land holdings shrank sharply. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier had shaped American character.

Trap The Dawes Act was not land for Native nations

The Dawes Act gave land to individual Native people, not to their nations, and it opened the remaining reservation land to white settlers. It aimed to end tribal ownership and Native ways of life. A choice saying it "protected tribal lands" or "returned land to Native nations" has it backward.

Worked example Easy

Hull House, opened in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, is the best-known example of which kind of institution?

  1. A political machine
  2. A labor union
  3. A settlement houseAnswer
  4. A Native boarding school

How to solve it

  1. Hull House was run by middle-class reformers living in a poor immigrant neighborhood.
  2. That is the definition of a settlement house.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. A political machine was a party organization run by a boss; Hull House was run by reformers who lived among the poor.
  • B. Incorrect. A labor union organizes workers to bargain with employers, while Hull House offered services to a neighborhood.
  • C. Correct. Hull House was a settlement house where reformers lived and offered classes, child care and other help to immigrant neighbors.
  • D. Incorrect. Native boarding schools tried to assimilate Native children; Hull House served immigrants in Chicago.

Explain Explain it

Task verbs: explain, analyze

Many questions here ask how a group responded to change. A strong answer names the group, the pressure on it and a specific response, with a date. For example, Irish and German Catholic immigrants built parochial schools in the 1800s so their children could be taught in their faith rather than in public schools that used Protestant Bibles.

To analyze a federal policy, ask what it said it would do, what it actually did, and who gained or lost.

Worked example Medium

What was a major result of the Dawes Act of 1887?

  1. Native nations gained full control over their reservations
  2. Native Americans were moved from the Plains back to the East
  3. The federal government ended its boarding school program
  4. The amount of land held by Native Americans fell sharplyAnswer

How to solve it

  1. Recall what allotment did: it gave individuals plots and sold the rest.
  2. Selling the leftover land to settlers is what made Native land holdings shrink.

Why each choice is right or wrong

  • A. Incorrect. The act weakened tribal control by dividing land among individuals, the opposite of full tribal control.
  • B. Incorrect. The act divided land where Native people already lived; it did not move them east.
  • C. Incorrect. Boarding schools expanded in the same years as part of the same assimilation policy.
  • D. Correct. Allotment and the sale of "surplus" land cut Native-held land from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million by 1934.

Explain Your turn

Explain one reason Chinese immigrants were singled out for exclusion in 1882.

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A full answer does this

  • Gives an accurate reason Chinese immigrants were targeted
  • Connects that reason to the 1882 exclusion law

Model answer

Many white workers in California feared competition from Chinese laborers, who were often paid less, and that fear mixed with racial prejudice against Asians. Anti-Chinese groups, such as Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party, pressed politicians, and Congress responded with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers in particular.

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