The Golden Door.

Between 1900 and 1910 nearly nine million people arrived in the United States from foreign shores, marking the country's all-time peak of immigration. The numbers had been steadily climbing since the Civil War, and at the same time the ethnic makeup of the immigrants had been changing considerably from northern and western European to southern and eastern European. Asian immigration was also a significant factor in America's evolving religious composition, for though the Japanese and Chinese communities of the West Coast were small, their thriving presence contributed substantially to American religious diversity with varieties of Buddhism and Shinto, among other traditions. Clearly the nation's white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant core population found itself increasingly surrounded by people whose languages, customs, and religious beliefs and practices varied substantially from the American mainstream, and immigration continued to outpace assimilation vastly. As the twentieth century...