American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analysis of what cities have in common, using theoretical models and scholarly biographies of specific cities.Michael Frisch, "American urban history as an example of recent historiography." History and Theory (1979): 350-377. in JSTOROnline review by Andrea Tuttle Kornbluh 1998. The United States has also had a long history of hostility to the city, as characterized for example by Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism and the Populist movement of the 1890s.Steven Conn, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (2014) Mary Sies (2003) argues:
Historiography American urban history is a branch of the history of the United States and of the broader field of urban history, which examines the historical development of cities and towns and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and even archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
From the 1920s to the 1990s many influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. or Oscar Handlin.Bruce M. Stave, ed., The Making of Urban History: Historiography through Oral History (1977) in GoogleTerrence J. McDonald, "Theory and Practice in the 'New' History: Rereading Arthur Meier Schlesinger's The Rise of the City, 1878–1898," Reviews in American History (1992) 20#3 pp. 432–445 in JSTOR Schlesinger and his students took a group approach to history, sharply playing down the role of individuals. Handlin added a focus on groups defined by ethnicity (that is Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians Hispanics etc.) or by class (working class or middle class). The Harvard model was that the urban environment, including the interaction with other groups, shaped their history and group outlook.Zane L. Miller, "The Crisis of Civic and Political Virtue: Urban History, Urban Life and the New Understanding of the City." Reviews in American History 24.3 (1996) pp. 361–368. online
New urban history The "new urban history" was a short-lived movement that attracted a great deal of attention In the 1960s, then quickly disappeared.Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (1970) It used statistical methods and innovative computer techniques to analyze manuscript census data, person by person, focusing especially on the geographical and social mobility of random samples of residents. Numerous monographs appeared, but it proved frustrating to interpret the results. Historian Stephan Thernstrom, the leading promoter of the new approach, soon disavowed it, saying it was neither new nor urban nor history.Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (1988) pp. 26–27
Overall urban history grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, stimulated by the surge of interest in social history.Raymond A. Mohl, "The History of the American City," in William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson Jr. eds., Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (1973) pp. 165–205 Since the 1990s, however, the field has been aging and has had much less attraction to younger scholars.
Claims for urban impact Historian Richard Wade summarizes the claims that scholars have made for the importance of the city in American history. The cities were the focal points for the growth of the West, especially those along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The cities, especially Boston, were the seed beds of the American Revolution. Rivalry between cities, such as between Baltimore and Philadelphia, or between Chicago and St. Louis, stimulated economic innovations and growth, especially regarding the railroads. The cities sponsored entrepreneurship, especially in terms of export and import markets, banking, finance, and the rise of the factory system after 1812. The rapidly growing railroad system after 1840 was primarily oriented toward linking together the major cities, which in turn became centers of the wholesale trade. The railroads allowed major cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, and San Francisco to dominate ever-larger hinterlands.
The failure of the South to develop an urban infrastructure significantly weakened it during the Civil War, especially as its border cities of Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, and St. Louis refused to join the Confederacy. The cities were fonts of innovation in democracy, especially in terms of building powerful political organizations and machines; they were also the main base for reformers of those machines. They became the home base for important immigrant groups, especially the Irish and the Jews. Cities were the strongholds of labor unions in the 19th and 20th centuries (although no longer so in the 21st century).Richard Wade, "The City in History: Some American Perspectives", in Werner Z. Hirsch, ed., Urban Life and Form (1963) pp. 59–77
Historian Zane Miller argues that urban history was rejuvenated in mid-20th century by the realization that the cultural importance of the city went far beyond art galleries and museums. Historians began to emphasize "the importance of individual choices in the past and made the advocacy of lifestyle choices a hallmark of American civilization." It was the diversity of the city, and the support it provided for diverse lifestyles, that set it so dramatically apart from towns and rural areas.Miller, "The Crisis of Civic and Political Virtue: Urban History, Urban Life and the New Understanding of the City." By the 1990s there was increased emphasis on racial minorities, outcasts, and gays and lesbians, as well as studies of leisure activities and sports history.George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994)Steven A. Riess, City games: The evolution of American urban society and the rise of sports (1991).
Intellectuals against the city As Morton White demonstrates in The Intellectual versus the City: from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (1962), the overwhelming consensus of American intellectuals has been hostile to the city. The main idea is the Romantic view that the unspoiled nature of rural America is morally superior over civilized cities, which are the natural homes of sharpsters and criminals. American poets did not rhapsodize over the cities. On the contrary they portrayed the metropolis as the ugly scene of economic inequality, crime, drunkenness, prostitution and every variety of immorality. Urbanites were set to rhyme as crafty, overly competitive, artificial, and as having lost too much naturalness and goodness.Robert H. Walker, "The Poet and the Rise of the City". Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1962): 85–99. in JSTORSee also Morton White and Lucia White, "The American intellectual versus the American city." Daedalus 90.1 (1961): 166-179 online
Colonial era and American Revolution
Historian Carl Bridenbaugh examined in depth five key cities: Boston (population 16,000 in 1760); Newport, Rhode Island (population 7,500); New York City (population 18,000), Philadelphia (population 23,000); and Charles Town (Charleston, South Carolina, population 8,000). He argues they grew from small villages to take major leadership roles in promoting trade, land speculation, immigration, and prosperity, in disseminating the ideas of the Enlightenment, and new methods in medicine and technology. They sponsored a consumer taste for English amenities, developed a distinctly American educational system, and began systems for care of people needing welfare.Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness-The First Century of Urban Life in America 1625-1742 (1938) online edition
The cities were not remarkable by European standards, but they did display certain distinctly American characteristics, according to Bridenbaugh. There was no aristocracy or established church; there was no long tradition of powerful guilds. The colonial governments were much less powerful and intrusive than corresponding national governments in Europe. They experimented with new methods to raise revenue, build infrastructure and to solve urban problems.Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness-The First Century of Urban Life in America 1625-1742 (1938) online edition
They were more democratic than European cities, in that a large fraction of the men could vote, and class lines were more fluid. Contrasted to Europe, printers (especially as newspaper editors) had a much larger role in shaping public opinion, and lawyers moved easily back and forth between politics and their profession. Bridenbaugh argues that by the mid-18th century, the middle-class businessmen, professionals, and skilled artisans dominated the cities. He characterizes them as "sensible, shrewd, frugal, ostentatiously moral, generally honest," public spirited, and upwardly mobile, and argues their economic strivings led to "democratic yearnings" for political power.Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (1955), pp 147, 332Benjamin L. Carp, "Cities in review," Common-Place (July 2003) 3#4 online
Colonial powers established villages of a few hundred population as administrative centers, providing a governmental presence, as well has trading opportunities, and some transportation facilities. Representative examples include Spanish towns of Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Antonio, and Los Angeles; French towns of New Orleans and Detroit; Dutch towns of New Amsterdam (New York City), and the Russian town of New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska). When their territories were absorbed into the United States, these towns expanded their administrative roles.Jacob Ernest Cooke, ed., Encyclopedia of the North American colonies (1993) 1: 113–154, 233–244. Numerous historians have explored the roles of working-class men, including slaves, in the economy of the colonial citiesSeth Rockman, "Work in the Cities of Colonial British North America," Journal of Urban History (2007) 33#6 pp. 102–1032 and in the early republic.Seth Rockman, "Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic." Journal of the Early Republic (2005) 25#4 pp. 527–535. online
There were few cities in the entire South, and Charles Town and New Orleans were the most important before the Civil War. The Province of South Carolina was settled mainly by planters from the overpopulated sugar island colony of Barbados, who brought large numbers of African slaves from that island.Peter Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), pp. 64–65. As Charles Town grew as a port for the shipment of rice and later cotton, so did the community's cultural and social opportunities. The city had a large base of elite merchants and rich planters.Walter J. Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!: The History of a Southern City (1991)