Newcomers.

Two related developments brought a new sense of urgency to the work of reformers during the years between 1840 and 1860. First, a trend in the migration of Americans from rural areas to the cities of the Northeast (a product of industrialization) was already well under way by midcentury, leading to increased public concern over the growing concentrations of poor people in urban areas. These concerns were compounded after the mid 1840s, however, by the influx of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Of the two main sources of immigration during this period, Ireland and Germany, the Irish made up the vast majority of newcomers. Successive failures of the potato crop in Ireland had reduced its population by half between 1845 and 1855: up to two million died of hunger and another two million immigrated, many of them...