A photograph of a Chinese woman taken at Ellis Island, New York
[Chinese Woman, Ellis Island, New York], 1905–1917, printed later
Marked Ellis Island

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The great migrations

Tens of millions of people left Europe and Asia for the Americas, and in the United States about six million Black Americans moved from the South to northern and western cities to escape segregation.

Place
Ellis Island · Angel Island · Chicago · Harlem · Buenos AiresThe Americas, Europe
Laid out as
A migrationPeople on the move: where they set out from, where they went, and what they found.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

From Ellis Islandto Buenos Aires

  1. ILeaving home
  2. IIEllis Island
  3. IIIAngel Island
  4. IVChinatowns and Little Italies
  5. VThe Great Migration north
  6. VIHarlem

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Annie Moore
  • Jacob Riis
  • Ida B. Wells
  • Langston Hughes
  • Jacob Lawrence

Objects

  • Ellis Island passenger lists
  • The Migration Series paintings

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1880 to 1970. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?