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IFL American History Book Club: Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America's Immigrant Hospital by Lorie Conway

Tuesday, May 24, 2022
11:00 am12:00 pm
Community Room of the Library at 11 AM

The IFL American History Book Club meets on the 4th Tuesday of each month to discuss their latest reading in American History. Hard copies of the title for checkout can be found on the Book Club Shelf on the first floor of the library.
This month we are reading: Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America's Immigrant Hospital by Lorie Conway
(208 pp)

The book tells the lost story of the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital that saved tens of thousands of lives as immigrants flooded onto Ellis Island a century ago. It was here that the germs of the world converged. The hospital was both welcoming and foreboding to those too sick to enter the country. Those nursed to health were allowed to become citizens. Those deemed feeble of body or mind were deported. Three short decades after it opened, the Ellis Island Hospital was all but abandoned. As America began shutting its border to all but a favored few, the hospital fell into disuse and decay and then into emptiness, its medical wards left open only to the salt air of the New York Harbor.

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