Along one wall of the Nation of Nations exhibit at the National Museum of History and Technology rests a narrow, straight-backed bench, a seemingly too plain and common item for a museum to preserve. However, it is not the bench itself that the Smithsonian seeks to celebrate, but rather the masses of people who, from 1892 to 1954, took refuge on it and others like it as they waited to hear if they would be allowed to enter the United States through the major port for immigration: New York City's Ellis Island. There, under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, passed Austrians, Italians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Canadians, West Indians, Africans, and Australians: people from all the continents of the world. As immigrants at Ellis Island, however, they were only some of the 27,572,583 people who streamed through immigration centers across the United States from 1881 to 1930, five decades often referred to as the third wave of American immigration.