“New immigrants” were those who arrived from southern and eastern Europe during and after the 1890s.

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private security force, was often hired to put down strikes during the labor disputes of the late nineteenth century. Most famously, the Pinkerton Agency clashed with strikers at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel plant outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1892.

Many of the millions of immigrants who arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as “birds of passage,” many of these eastern and southern European migrants were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. They came to America to earn enough money to allow them to return home and purchase a piece of land. As one Slavic steelworker put it: “A good job, save money, work all time...

Hull House was a settlement house founded in Chicago by reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Addams and Starr established Hull House, the first settlement house in Chicago, to help improve the lives of immigrants and others living in urban slums. Hull House provided myriad resources, including education, child care, and other social services. It also served as a center for activism, with Addams and Starr working to promote various reforms in labor, education, women's rights, and other areas.