North American immigrant letters, diaries and oral histories

Provides a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. Included are approximately 100,000 pages of primary source such as letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, political cartoons, and oral histories. Materials included cover a period from approximately 1840 to the present, with most of the focus on the period from 1890 to 1920. People from many countries are represented, including more recent waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Several thousand pages of Ellis Island oral history interviews are indexed and searchable as well.