AMERICAN
CIVILIZATION
L2
Dr. Diome FAYE
1
Chapter 1: U.S. Population (A nation
of immigrants/the different racial
groups/salad bowl or melting pot?)
Chapter 2: The Manifest Destiny
Chapter 3: The Monroe Doctrine
Chapter 4: The Westward Expansion
Chapter 5: Pragmatism
Chapter 1:
U.S. Population
In the past four centuries, the
population of the United States
has grown from a recorded 350
people around the Jamestown
colony of Virginia in 1610, to
an estimated 333 million
people in 2022.
A Nation of Immigrants
People migrate from one place to another for various
reasons. The events or conditions in the emigrant’s home
country that motivate him or her to leave are known as
push factors. Push factors can be economic, social,
political, and environmental. The conditions that attract
an emigrant to settle in a particular place are known as
pull factors. Pull factors include safety and stability,
political and religious freedom, and economic
opportunity, as well as educational opportunities, access
to healthcare, improved quality of life, and the
opportunity to reunite with family and friends.
The nation’s first major wave of
immigration after 1824 consisted
primarily of northern Europeans from
Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, and
Scandinavia. The second wave of
immigrants—over 34 million people,
mainly from southern and eastern
Europe—arrived between 1890 and
1924. The peak year for admission of
new immigrants was 1907, when
approximately 1.3 million people entered
the country.
As waves of immigrants arrived in
the United States, they were often
met with nativism, xenophobia, and
anti-immigrant sentiment. Nativism
is a policy that promotes the interests
of native inhabitants over those of
immigrants, while xenophobia is a
fear or distrust of what is perceived
to be foreign, especially people
considered “outsiders.”
World War I (1914-1918) led to a decline in
immigration, and Congress enacted what became
a series of laws to restrict immigration, including
the Immigration Act of 1917. The law required
immigrants over the age of 16 to pass a literacy
test and required all persons to undergo medical
examinations to determine whether the immigrant
had a contagious disease, or was affected by a
physical or mental condition that was likely to
prevent him or her from earning a living. The law
also prohibited the entry of immigrants from
Asian nations, with the exception of Japan and the
Philippines, which was a United States colony.
In 1921 and 1924, the United States passed
even stricter laws to regulate immigration,
including the Emergency Immigration
Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of
1924, which established quotas for the
admission of immigrants and banned
immigration from Asia.
While earlier legislation placed caps on
immigration, the 1924 immigration law,
known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited
immigration even further. It restricted the
number of immigrants that could be admitted
to the U.S. to two percent of the total number
of individuals from each nationality that
resided in the United States in 1890. It was
designed to keep out Southern and Eastern
Europeans, primarily Italians and Jews, who
began arriving en masse after 1890, as well as
Africans and Middle Easterners. The law also
barred Asian immigration entirely.
Such policies remained in effect until
1965, when Congress passed the
Immigration and Nationality Act, which
eliminated quotas based on nationality and
allowed Americans to sponsor relatives
from their countries of origin. As a result,
the nation experienced a shift in
immigration patterns and demographics,
and today, the majority of the country’s
immigrants come from Asia and Latin
America
THE MANIFEST DESTINY
The ”City Upon a Hill”
The essence of a mindset.
Divine obligation to stretch the
boundaries to the Pacific Ocean.
THE DIFFERENT
IMPLICATIONS OF THE
CONCEPT
