400 Years of American Migration In 29 Minutes

There is a brick house at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. In the 1830s two men kept a pen behind it, and twice a year they marched the people held there a thousand miles to Natchez. Roughly one million people were moved from the upper South to the Deep South that way before the Civil War — about two and a half times the number of Africans ever landed directly in mainland North America. It is the largest forced migration in American history and it appears in almost no history of American migration. This is the complete history of immigration and migration in America, in chronological order: every wave, every closure, and everyone who was moved once they got here. Jamestown to the present, on one timeline. In this video: The headright system that gave land in exchange for importing people. The 1662 law that made slavery hereditary in a single sentence. Bacon's Rebellion and what the planter class did in response. Why only about 4% of the transatlantic slave trade landed in North America — and why the population still grew so large. The Puritan Great Migration and why it stopped dead in 1640. Palatine Germans, Ulster Scots, Highland Scots after Culloden, and the 50,000 convicts Britain shipped to Virginia and Maryland. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The Second Middle Passage. Indian Removal. The Erie Canal. The Famine Irish and the Know-Nothings. The Page Act of 1875. The Great Wave, and the single day in 1907 when 11,747 people came through Ellis Island. How Angel Island worked differently, and the poems still carved in its walls. The 1924 quota law, the census year it used, and why Italy went from 200,000 a year to under 4,000. Mexican repatriation in the 1930s. The St. Louis. The Dust Bowl. Japanese American incarceration. The Bracero programme. The Great Migration. The 1956 Indian Relocation Act. And how the foreign-born share of America fell to 4.7% in 1970 and came all the way back to 14.8% — exactly where it stood in 1890. Chapters 0:00 The pen on Duke Street 4:00 Jamestown and the headright 8:00 1619, and the forty unsettled years 12:00 The law closes around it 15:00 New Netherland, New Sweden, New Spain 18:00 The Puritan migration and its sudden stop 21:00 What happened to the people already here 24:00 Palatines, Ulster Scots and convicts 29:00 The slave trade, and the number everyone gets wrong 32:00 The Atlantic shuts 34:00 The Second Middle Passage 38:00 Removal, and the Erie Canal 41:00 The Famine, the Germans, the Chinese 45:00 The Great Wave 49:00 Ellis Island and Angel Island 53:00 The door closes, 1924 56:00 Repatriation and refusal 59:00 The Dust Bowl 62:00 War, internment and the Bracero programme 66:00 Relocation 69:00 1965, and everything after 73:00 Back to one in seven 76:00 Three things people get wrong Tell me in the comments: which wave was your family? Colonial, Famine Irish, Forty-Eighter German, the great wave before the door closed, displaced person, or after 1965? Country and decade — and the port if you know it. #AmericanHistory #Immigration #Genealogy #EllisIsland #FamilyHistory