Congo Square jazz, the Gold Rush, Ellis Island, the Great Migration, the Dust Bowl — the cultural and demographic shifts that gave the country its texture state by state.
5 Stories · States & Culture
Drought, dryland farming, and the Great Depression turned the southern Plains into a wasteland. Two and a half million people left. The federal government rewrote what it owed them.
Six million Black Americans left the South between 1916 and 1970, remaking the cities of the North and West. Jacob Lawrence painted them in sixty panels.
Twelve million arrivals passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the gates for the next forty years.
James Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill on January 24, 1848. Three hundred thousand people arrived in two years. California became a state on September 9, 1850.
In an open square in New Orleans, enslaved Africans were permitted to gather on Sundays. Their music — call-and-response, polyrhythm, improvisation — became jazz a century later.