“While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in – most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;.”

“While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in – most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;.”

— Simon Winchester