The Associated Press is reporting that the Ellis Island Immigration Museum is creating The Peopling of America Center to tell the history of those who arrived in America outside the traditional peak immigration dates of 1892 to 1954:
Exhibits will focus on the arrival of Native Americans, who are believed to have migrated to North America more than 10,000 years ago across the Bering Sea from Asia; Europeans who landed on the Eastern seaboard from the 1600s through 1892; Africans brought here forcibly by slave traders; and today’s immigrants from all over the globe…
The $20 million, 20,000-square-foot space, designed by Edwin Schlossberg of ESI Design, will be located in an existing gallery that will be redesigned and in an adjoining building that now houses the curatorial staff…
Work on the new center began in September. Funding has been underwritten in part by Bank of America and the Annenberg Foundation. Briganti said the foundation has attained more than 75 percent of its fundraising goal.
Upon its completion in 2011, the museum will be renamed Ellis Island: The National Museum of Immigration.
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