Chapter 25 Terms and Definitions

New Immigrants: The wave of immigrants who arrived after 1880, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, differing in language, religion, and culture from earlier "Old Immigrants" from northern and western Europe.
Old Immigrants: Immigrants who arrived mainly before 1880 from northern and western Europe (Britain, Germany, Scandinavia), generally Protestant and more easily assimilated.
Ellis Island: The federal immigration processing station in New York Harbor, opened in 1892, through which millions of new arrivals passed for inspection.
Angel Island: The immigration station in San Francisco Bay that processed mostly Asian immigrants, often subjecting them to harsher scrutiny and longer detentions than Ellis Island.
Nativism: Hostility toward immigrants by native-born Americans, who often blamed newcomers for urban problems, job competition, and cultural change.
American Protective Association (APA): A nativist organization founded in 1887 that campaigned against Catholic immigrants and for restrictions on immigration.
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): A federal law barring nearly all Chinese immigration, the first major U.S. law to restrict immigration based on nationality.
Settlement House Movement: A reform effort in which educated, often middle-class volunteers lived among the urban poor to provide childcare, education, and social services.
Jane Addams: Co-founder of Hull House in Chicago (1889), the most famous American settlement house, and a leading voice for social reform and later, world peace.
Social Gospel: A religious movement urging churches to apply Christian ethics to social problems like poverty and labor exploitation, rather than focusing solely on personal salvation.
Social Darwinism: The application of "survival of the fittest" to human society, often used to justify urban poverty and inequality as natural outcomes.
Dwight L. Moody: A popular urban revivalist preacher whose traveling crusades brought old-time religion to the growing cities of the Gilded Age.
Morrill Act: An 1862 law (with a follow-up in 1890) granting federal land to states to fund public "land-grant" colleges, many focused on agriculture and engineering.
Booker T. Washington: Founder of the Tuskegee Institute, who urged Black Americans to pursue vocational education and economic self-help rather than immediate agitation for political rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Harvard-educated Black scholar and activist who challenged Washington's gradualism, demanding full civil rights and higher education for the "talented tenth."
Mark Twain: Pen name of Samuel Clemens, whose realist novels captured authentic American speech and satirized the era he helped name "the Gilded Age."
Realism (literary movement): A late-19th-century literary style depicting ordinary life and social conditions honestly, in contrast to earlier romantic idealism.
Ashcan School: A group of American realist painters who depicted gritty, everyday urban scenes rather than idealized subjects.
Jacob Riis: A journalist and photographer whose 1890 book, "How the Other Half Lives," exposed the squalor of New York's tenement slums to middle-class readers.
Tenement: A crowded, often unsanitary multi-family apartment building common in late-19th-century immigrant urban neighborhoods.
Political Machine: An urban political organization, often led by a "boss," that traded favors, jobs, and social services for votes and loyalty, exemplified by New York's Tammany Hall.