Ellis Island takes in four million Italians in three decades

The immigrant receiving station on Ellis Island opened in 1892. Through it over the next thirty years came close to four million Italian Catholics, half a million Greeks of the Orthodox church, half a million Hungarian Catholics, close to a million and a half Polish Catholics, over two million Jews out of Russian ruled Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, half a million Slovaks and millions of other Slavs from Byelorussia, Ruthenia, Russia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Of the 123 million people recorded in the census of 1930, one in ten had been born abroad and another twenty per cent had at least one foreign born parent. Almost a third of Chicago's 2.7 million residents in the 1920s were foreign born. New Yorkers spoke about thirty seven languages and only one in six attended a Protestant church. Many did not stay. Nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks and Croatians went home again, and more than half the Greeks.

On 4 November 1892 the women soldiers of Dahomey fought the French army at the gates of Cana. It was their last battle. The kingdom fell, and the French abolished the Dahomean monarchy in 1900. The date of the ending is exact, which is unusual, and the date of the beginning is not. Claims in the literature run from the reign of Wegbaja, who ruled somewhere between about 1640 and the early 1680s, to that of Glele, who ruled from 1858 to 1889. Most writers have credited either Agaja, king in the 1720s and 1730s, or Gezo, king from 1818 to 1858. Amelie Degbelo, who interviewed scores of Dahomeans for a thesis, found that ninety nine of every hundred named Gezo. He certainly enlarged the corps, hardened its training and armed it better. The women were called amazons by Europeans, and they were the standing infantry of a West African state.

In 1896 the bishop of Cap-Haitien condemned the religion of most Haitians in terms he chose for their violence. It was responsible, he said, for violations of the purity of the faith, for offences against the saints and for outrages against God himself. Whatever the cost, he went on, the tumour had to be removed, and a pitiless war had to be waged against the army of brigands, the bokor, whose mere existence disgraced the country. Eradication campaigns had begun soon after the first African captives were landed and had continued through the colonial period; what changed after independence was only that the state conducting them was Haitian. A bishop describing a large part of his own flock as a tumour is worth reading twice. The people he wanted removed were the ones who buried the dead, treated the sick and held the rural communities together in a country with almost no doctors.

The Jamaica International Exhibition opened in 1891 under Governor Henry Blake. Kingston was hung with wreaths and triumphal arches, fireworks were set off, and visitors came in from the countryside and from abroad over the fourteen weeks it ran. Haiti had attempted the same thing ten years before. The Haitian Exhibition of 1881, staged under Lysius Salomon, failed to raise the foreign interest in Haitian agriculture that its organisers wanted. Jamaica hoped for more and got less than it spent, since the show ended as a financial loss. The colony counted tourism and foreign investment as the real return. Royal Mail steamers arriving weekly were joined by United Fruit ships bringing visitors from Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Government money then went into hotels, and the Myrtle Bank, the Constant Spring and the Queen's became the places tourists stayed. Both islands were being drawn into an American commercial system, from opposite ends of it.