Historical Glossary

The US acquired Idaho by the Louisiana Purchase. In 1834 the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. built the first US outpost beyond the Continental Divide at Fort Hall (abandoned 1856). In 1860 Mormons began settling Idaho. A gold rush attracting up to 30,000 miners broke out in 1861 along the Snake River, and Idaho Territory was created out of Wash. on 4 March 1863. In 1870 it had 14,999 residents. The Northern Paiute, Nez Perce, and Sheepeater campaigns took place in Idaho. Rapid development came after Idaho was entered by railroads in 1880 and the Coeur d'Alene silver boom began in 1884. It became the 43rd state on 3 July 1890. In 1900 Idaho had 161,772 residents (95 percent white, 3 percent Indian, 1 percent Chinese, 1 percent Japanese), of whom 94 percent were rural and 15 percent were foreign-born; it ranked 46th among the states in population, 43rd in the value of agricultural goods, and 49th in manufactures. The Carey and National Reclamation acts fostered large-scale agricultural development by irrigation. Food processing, tourism, and urban growth diversified the economy after 1945. In 1990 Idaho was the 42nd largest state and had 1,006,749 inhabitants (approx. 92 percent white, 5 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Indian, 1 percent Asian), of whom 20 percent were urban and 2.9 percent were foreign-born. Manufacturing employed 15 percent of the work force and mining 7 percent. 

In December 1674, Fr Jacques Marquette founded a mission at modern Chicago, France's first outpost in Ill. In 1680 the Sieur de La Salle began building the first of several forts for the fur trade in northern Ill. French settlers founded towns at Cahokia in 1698 and Kaskaskia in 1709. On 27 September 1717, Ill. was established as a district of Louisiana. The treaty of Paris (1763) gave Ill. to Britain, and George Rogers Clark conquered it for the US, but de facto control lapsed to the British from 1784 to Jay's Treaty. A trickle of Anglo-Americans began settling southern Ill. after 1800 and it was made a territory on 9 February 1809. It became the 21st state on 3 December 1818 and had 55,211 residents in 1820. Its only major Indian disturbance was the brief Black Hawk War.
Its population grew by 1,442 percent from 1820 to 1850, and then doubled in the 1850s. In 1860 it had 1,711,951 inhabitants, of whom over 99 percent were white and 19 percent were of foreign birth; it ranked fourth among the states in the value of its farmland and livestock and eighth in manufactures. In the Civil War, it furnished 259,092 USA troops (including 1,811 blacks), but it contained numerous Copperheads.
Rapid growth around Chicago attracted heavy inmigration from other states or Europe and 733,300 new residents moved to Ill. between 1880 and 1910. By 1900, it was 46 percent rural and had 4,821,550 inhabitants, of whom 98 percent were white and 20 percent were foreign-born; it ranked third among the states in population, second in the value of its agricultural goods, and third in manufactures. Moderate growth since 1930 has reduced its ranking among states to sixth largest by 1990, when it had 11,430,602 residents (75 percent white, 15 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian), of whom 83 percent were urban and 8.3 percent were foreign-born. Manufacturing and mining employed 25 percent of all workers. 

The French originally called all Indians who traded furs with them in northern Ill. by this name. There may have been 10,500 Indians speaking Algonquian languages in Ill. in the 1660s, when contact was first made with French explorers. They welcomed French forts to carry on the fur trade, but were then attacked by the Iroquois Confederacy in the beaver wars during the period 1677–84. European epidemics and intertribal warfare steadily reduced the Illinois bands, until by 1768 observers of the Kaskaskias and Peorias and Mascoutens estimated just 1,100 warriors, indicating a total of about 5,000. These groups declined even further, leaving Ill. almost entirely vacant of Indians by 1810, and in the 1840s they agreed to accept a small reservation in Kans. 

Before 1700, over 90 percent of all immigrants to the present US were English or Welsh, of whom perhaps 10 percent had formerly resided in the West Indies. The first substantial wave of settlement was the Great Migration (1630–60), which brought nearly half that century's arrivals. An estimated 168,000 Europeans came during the 17th century: 120,000 to Va. and Md., 30,000 to New England, 10,000 to Pa. and N.J., 3,000 to S.C., 2,500 Dutch to N.Y., 2,000 Huguenots to N.Y., N.J., Va., and S.C., and 500 swedes to Del. This migration raised the English colonies' white population to 223,000 by 1700. The 17th century was the last period in which population growth resulted primarily from immigration rather than natural increase.
After 1700, only 20 percent of immigrants were English or Welsh, while Scotch-Irish, Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch predominated. Between 1700 and 1775, 307,000 Europeans arrived: 73,000 English and Welsh, 84,400 Germans, 66,100 Ulster Scots, 42,500 Irish, 35,000 Scots, and 6,000 French or others. From 1780 to 1800, 161,000 more came: 107,000 Irish, 22,000 English, Welsh, or Scots, 14,000 Haitian colonists, 2,000 French, 14,000 Germans, and 2,000 others. By 1800, these 636,000 immigrants had produced 4,306,000 descendants.
An estimated 184,000 immigrants entered the US between 1801 and 1819, primarily from the British Isles. In 1820 the US began documenting the arrival of foreigners, but it excluded no one (although the Naturalization acts denied citizenship to nonwhites). European emigration accelerated rapidly after 1846. From 1820 to 1860, 5,060,000 Europeans settled in the US, and 90 percent of them settled in the northeast or midwest. In 1860 13 percent of the population were immigrants, whom the census described as predominantly English-speaking (59 percent) and western European: 39 percent Irish, 31 percent German, 14 percent British, 6 percent Canadian, 3 percent French, and 2 percent Scandinavian.
State efforts to keep foreigners from becoming a public burden led to the immigration cases. Congress then passed the Exclusion Act (18 August 1882), which ended unrestricted entry to the US by barring the insane, criminals, paupers, and (for ten years) Chinese immigration. Restriction of contract laborers followed with the Contract Labor Act (1885). The Chinese Exclusion Ruling upheld Congress's right to bar nationalities from entrance. Gentlemen's Agreements later blocked Japanese immigration.
Between 1866 and 1915, about 25,000,000 persons came to the US. The number of arrivals from northern and western Europe, so-called “old immigrants,” steadily fell after 1883. After 1895, “new immigrants” from Mediterranean and Slavic nations predominated; they outnumbered “Nordic” migrants after 1895, and over 9,000,000 had entered the US by 1914. When immigration began averaging 1,000,000 annually (1910–14), fears rose that the US could not economically absorb those masses, and that eastern and southern Europeans posed special problems in being assimilated to American life.
The Emergency Quota Act (1921) instituted the first limitation on immigration by ethnic origins (designed to prefer northern and western Europeans) and also capped the number of annual entrants. The National Origins Act (1924) set stricter quotas on Mediterranean and Slavic peoples. Admissions to the US dropped from 4,107,200 in the 1920s to 528,400 in the 1930s. Refugees from eastern and central Europe received preferential treatment after World War II by the Displaced Persons acts (1948, 1950, and 1951). The McCarran–Walter Act permitted Asian refugees to immigrate. These measures gave entry to 3,500,000 people from 1945 to 1960.
The Immigration Reform Act (1965) repealed the quotas system, but set the first limits on immigration from the western hemisphere; it authorized admission of up to 2,900,000 persons per decade. Because of this law, nonwhites have formed the bulk of immigrants since the the early 1970s. Preferential admission to anti-Communist refugees also allowed the admission of large numbers of boat people and Cubans. The greatest factor increasing the scale of non-European immigration was the rise in illegal Mexican and Haitian entries, which inspired passage of the futile Simpson–Mazzoli Act. Immigration consequently swelled to 4,493,000 in the 1970s and 7,338,000 in the 1980s. Between 1981 and 1990, legal and illegal immigrants accounted for 32.8 percent of total population growth. By 1991, the foreign-born numbered 14,020,000, 13.2 percent of the US population.
From 1820 to 1991, 58,821,181 foreigners entered the US, of which 32.5 percent entered during 1820–1900, 24.7 percent during 1901–20, 7.9 percent during 1921–40, 11.6 percent during 1945–70, and 23.3 percent during 1971–91. (One in six immigrants have returned home or gone to another country.) The greatest number of entrants have come from Germany (12.1 percent), Italy (9.2 percent), Great Britain (8.7 percent), Mexico (8.2 percent), Ireland (8.0 percent), Austria-Hungary (7.4 percent), Canada (7.3 percent), Russia (5.9 percent). It is estimated that had no immigration occurred after 1820, the US population in 1990 would have grown only to 121,710,000, just 49 percent of its actual level of 248,710,000. 

On 23 June 1983, the Supreme Court held (7–2) that Article I of the Constitution is inconsistent with laws permitting the single-house legislative veto, in which either chamber of Congress may vote to override a decision made by the executive department. Article I requires that legislative enactments must be passed by both houses and presented to the president.