ON THE SLAVS and ITALIANS and JEWS IN THE 1870'S : THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE

pages 234-235 Nell Irvin Painter Author

..." Economic hard times further aggravated labor tensions. In the 1870's Slavic and Italian coal miners in Western Pennsylvania suffered abuse, ostracism, cheating, incarceration, and attack. The U.S. Army massacred Lakota (Sioux) at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890, as lynching that scourge of black Americans, took the lives of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Elsewhere labor conflict brought out company private militia (such as the Pinkertons) and state and national guards to course striking workers, as in the Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworks in 1892...

A notable instance of anti-Semitism occurred in 1877 when a Saratoga Aperings hotel refused to admit the New York financier Joseph Seligman, whose bank had helped fiance the Union during the Civil War. Organized outbreaks of anti Jewish violence occurred for the first time during the Depression of the 1890's.  In Lousiana and Mississippi night riders attacked Jewish families and businesses. Personal abuse like stone throwing, hitherto occasional, became common throughout the North. When their employer hired fourteen Russian Jews, five hundred New Jersey workers rioted for three days in 1891, forcing Jewish workers and residents to flee..."

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Commentary from ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

I you're writing an authentic family history, it's important to relay the memories of relatives and their experiences with ethnic and religious prejudices. Placing the story in history can help the reader's modern perspective.  If there are various stories that do not agree, it is good to publish them all, crediting the story teller and their relationship to the story.