Hello, this is Carl Raymond, host of the Gilded Gentleman History Podcast, where every two weeks we journey into corners light and dark of America's

Gilded Age, Francis Bellet Puck, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The 19th century in America saw a series of great overlapping waves of immigration as new

arrivals came with hope for a new or better life of safety, promise, and opportunity.

While there was much in common among those coming to America's shores, each group had

differences in what they had left behind and in what they wanted to find

in this new world. In the most general of terms, on the East Coast at least, it was the Irish who

came in the first quarter of the 19th century, followed by Italians and Germans, and toward

the end of the 19th century, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and particularly waves of Jewish immigrants

from Russia, quite literally escaping for their lives. Much of this story of how the thousands of

these Russian Jews actually were able to escape across difficult land routes and closed borders,

and then through various ports before finally making it to America,

has never been fully told until now.

It is thanks to the research and writing of my guests today that we can finally understand

how the efforts of three particular men, the German, Albert Ballin, managing director of the shipping line that brought so many

immigrants across the Atlantic.

The financier, Jacob Schiff, whose philanthropic work facilitated their passage and their

life once they arrived on American shores.

And then the American Gilead Age financial titan, J.P. Morgan, whose efforts of creating a

monopoly ultimately failed, yet allowed passage for thousands of immigrants. From the 1890s at the

height of America's Gilded Age into the years of the 20th century, over two million Jews fled

their homes in Eastern Europe and made it to America.

...