Word: 1840s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...foremost industrial centers in America. As more mills were built, their owners recruited young, single New England farm girls as laborers. When the "mill girls," as they were called, rebelled against the long hours and low wages, they were replaced by Irishmen fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s. In a scheme to rid downtown Lowell of the unwanted Irish workers, the Yankee mill owners donated an acre of land southwest of the city's center. The neighborhood became a gateway for generations of immigrants who went to Lowell in search of work and a better life. On wages...
...European nation lost proportionately more of its sons and daughters to the U.S. than Ireland: in all, some 4,250,000 from 1820 to 1920. Native-born Americans sniffed at these Gaels -- made desperate by the potato famine that devastated their homeland in the 1840s -- as filthy, bad-tempered and given to drink. The haunting, taunting employment sign NO IRISH NEED APPLY became a bitter American cliche. And yet Irish lasses made the clothmaking factories of New England hum. Irish lads built the Erie Canal, paved the highways and laid tracks for the railroads. In the South the Irish were...
...bias. (Curiously, it was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census took note of where Americans were born.) Apart from slaves, Asians (principally the Chinese) suffered most from this prejudice. Seeking fortune and escape from the turmoil of the Opium Wars, Chinese first began arriving in California during the 1840s. Initially, they were welcomed. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese were working in the state's gold fields, many of them as prospectors. As the ore gave out, former miners were hired to build the Central Pacific Railroad; others dug the irrigation canals that poured fertility -- and prosperity -- into...
...THIS sounds familiar, that's because it is. The Republican Party, it will be remembered, began in precisely the same way back in the 1840s...
...pool of blood which flowed out of Ireland as Oliver Cromwell reduced the population from 1,466,000 to 616,000 in one decade in the mid-17th century. The white is not as pale as the faces of the millions who died during the famine of the 1840s while the British estate owners exported Irish wheat and livestock to pay for their extravagant lifestyles...