Public Library Adult Education for Immigrants in North Carolina

Abstract

In the period from 1876, the founding year of the American Library Association, to 1924, the effective year of the National Origins Act with its quotas for immigrants, U.S. public libraries of the Northeast, the West, and the Midwest were busy organizing to serve the needs of the flood of millions of immigrants from Southeastern and Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East.1 North Carolina did not receive any significant number of immigrants from this influx as they had earlier immigrants, including Germans, English, French, Irish, and Scots, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. By 1880, these former immigrants were now established North Carolina citizens who had been assimilated, or Americanized, the term used at in the early twentieth century, and spoke English, albeit in differing and sometimes colorful accents and dialects.