A.P.U.S. History Outline
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I. Urbanization
A. Industrial Sources of City Growth
1. Until the Civil War, cities were centers of commerce not industry.
2. Cities were places where merchants bought and sold there goods.
3. After mid-century, industry began to abandon the countryside.
4. NY, Phil., Brooklyn, St, Louis were among the largest cities.
5. Many smaller cities became one-industry towns.
6. As factories became bigger, their size cont. to urban growth.
B. City Building
1. The commercial cities of the early nineteenth century had been compact places.
2. The first innovation, dating back to the 1820’s had been omnibus, and elongated version of the horse-drawn coach.
3. Then came the electric trolley car.
4. In 1890 the number of passengers carried on American Streets railways was more than 2 billion per year, twice the rest of the world combined.
5. If urban transit evolved in response to the geographic expansion of the American city, the need for more space in downtown business districts drove advances in building constructions.
6. Chicago pioneered skyscraper construction, but the island of Manhattan.
7. For ordinary citizens the electric lights that dispelled the gloom of the city at night probably offered the most dramatic evidence that times had changed.
C. The City as Private Enterprise
1. City building was very much an exercise in private enterprise. The lure profit spurred the great innovations- the trolley car, electric lighting, the skyscraper, the elevator, the telephone- and drove urban realesate development.
2.American Cities actually compiled an impressive record in the late nineteenth century.
3. Even with planning the city’s dynamism often confounded efforts to meet the needs of the people. 4. Hardest hit by urban growth were the poor.
5. Chicago and Berlin had virtually equal populations in 1900.
6. Yet as a functioning city Chicago was in many ways superior to Berlin.
7. Giant sanitation projects were one thing.
II. City People
A. Newcomers
1. With the opportunity and boundless variety came disorder and uncertainty.
2. At the turn of the century, upward of 30% of the residents of New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and San Francisco were foreign born.
3. W/in ethic groups, one could also spot clusters of people from the same province or even village.
4. Capitalizing on the fellow-feeling that drew ethic groups together.
5. The vast majority of Blacks- 85% in 1880- lived in the rural South.
6. In the face of pervasive discrimination, urban blacks built their own communities.
B. Ward Politics
1. Race ethnicity tended to divide newcomers to the city and turn them in on themselves.
2. The machine similarly served the business community.
3. For ambitious young immigrants and balcks, this was reason enough to favor the machine system.
C. Religion in the City
1. For African Americans the church was a central institution of urban life.
2. About 250,000 Jews, mostly of German origin, were living in American when the eastern European Jews began to arrive in the 1800s.
3. The church managed to satisfy the immigrant faithful.