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Jan 26, 2021 · Urban growth of 35 U.S. cities from 1810 to 2015, arranged in a pseudo-geographic space (upper right = northeast, lower left = southwest). This animation is ...
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This video follows CH 25 of the American Pageant. It looks at Urbanization and Immigration, which naturally coincided with Industrialization. Several issue a...
- 26 min
- 398
- Mr. Dailey Westbrook HS
- Overview
- From farm to city
- The Second Industrial Revolution and urbanization
- City life
- New York City in the Gilded Age
- What do you think?
The industrial boom of the late nineteenth century led Americans and immigrants from the world over to leave farming life and head to the city.
Today most Americans live in cities or suburbs, but from colonial times into the early twentieth century a majority of Americans lived in the countryside and worked on farms. Only two percent of Americans live on farms or ranches today, but in 1790 ninety percent of the population did. What caused this shift?
The movement of populations from rural to urban areas is called urbanization. Urbanization in the United States increased gradually in the early 1800s and then accelerated in the years after the Civil War. By 1890, twenty-eight percent of Americans lived in urban areas, and by 1920 more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas.1
The principal force driving America’s move into cities was the Second Industrial Revolution.
In the United States the industrial revolution came in two waves. The first saw the rise of factories and mechanized production in the late 1700s and early 1800s and included steam-powered spinning and weaving machines, the cotton gin, steamboats, locomotives, and the telegraph. The Second Industrial Revolution took off following the Civil War with the introduction of interchangeable parts, assembly-line production, and new technologies, including the telephone, automobile, electrification of homes and businesses, and more.
Cities in the Gilded Age were studies in contrasts. The wealthy lived in urban mansions while the poor crowded into tenement houses, apartment buildings with tiny rooms, no ventilation, and poor sanitation. Not until journalist and reformer Jacob Riis published his eye-opening photoessay How the Other Half Lives in 1890 did cities begin passing ordinances to make tenement housing safer.3
The Second Industrial Revolution also changed the physical composition of cities. The invention in the 1850s of the Otis elevator and Bessemer steelmaking process (an inexpensive process for the mass production of steel) created the material means for the rise of tall city buildings, some so tall they were said to scrape the sky—skyscrapers. The advent of trolleys and subways also allowed city dwellers to move about with ease on public transportation, encouraging developers to build new suburbs, allowing people to live outside the city center and commute to work.
The diversity of the nation’s cities was nowhere more on display than in the nation’s largest city, New York. At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was the national capital of finance, industry, shipping and trade, publishing, the arts, and immigration, a magnet that drew to it much of the best and most avant-garde in art and literature. With a population of more than three million in 1900 and 4.7 million by 1910, New York was more than twice as populous than Chicago, the nation's second-ranked city, three times as large as third-ranked Philadelphia, and six to nine times as large as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Cleveland, all urban centers of immigrants.4
By 1910, New York’s millionaires had built palatial mansions along much of Fifth Avenue, while, at the same time, many New Yorkers lived in poverty. The Lower East Side was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, housing tens of thousands in ill-lighted, overcrowded tenements, many without running water, flush toilets, or electricity. An 1893 observer in this section of the city wrote of the "fermenting garbage in the gutter and the smell of stale beer" and the sight of exhausted sweatshop workers toiling away, sewing clothes for the garment industry.5
What drew Americans and immigrants to move into the nation’s cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Do you think the city offered them a better life?
What were some of the contrasts in life between the rich and the poor in cities such as New York at the turn of the twentieth century?
Historians reach for words like “revolution” and “world-historical” in describing big historical changes. Would you consider the movement from farms to cities, from colonial times to today, to be revolutionary? Why or why not?
[Notes and attributions]
The urbanization of the United States occurred over a period of many years, with the nation only attaining urban-majority status between 1910 and 1920. [2] Currently, over four-fifths of the U.S. population resides in urban areas, a percentage which is still increasing today. [2] The United States Census Bureau changed its classification and ...
State/territory2020 [7]2010200080.0%80.7%79.0%84.0%85.0%84.4%74.3%75.9%74.7%75.8%75.8%72.8%Urbanization occurred rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States for a number of reasons. The new technologies of the time led to a massive leap in industrialization, requiring large numbers of workers. New electric lights and powerful machinery allowed factories to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Figure 14.1 “Populations of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, 1790–2010” depicts the growth of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles from 1790 to 2010. Chicago and Los Angeles first appear in the graph when they began to rank in the largest one hundred cities. Note that the populations of New York and Chicago show some decline after 1950.
