Images from HIUS 202

Climbing into America, Uncertain of their future, these newly arrived émigrés stepped into the new life America promised to them. At Ellis Island immigrants were welcomed with the famous words of Emma Lazarus, in her poem, New Colossus, inscribed in 1886 at the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me." This photo was taken in 1908 by Lewis Hine, an early twentieth social reformer and photographer who worked with social agencies and charities. Source: Alan Trachtenberg, America and Lewis Hine (1977).

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