18

American Society in

the Industrial Age

American Society in

the Industrial Age

CONTENTS

■Lewis Hine’s 1910 photograph shows a tenement alley in New York City.

More famous for his “unsettling” photographs of the ills of the cities, Hine

sought to depict urban life in all its fullness.

485

freedom of speech and the right to assemble. Malls are

not public property.

Yet recent malls have been designed to evoke the

public spaces of the nineteenth-century city. The Mall of

America includes an exhibition gallery, amusement park,

wedding chapel, assembly hall, school, medical clinic, and

a central “Rotunda” for staging “public events” ranging

from gardening shows to Hulk Hogan wrestling matches.

In the late nineteenth century, city life was played out

in spaces that really were public. Factory workers walked

to work along crowded streets or jammed into streetcars

or subways. Courting couples strolled through shopping

districts or public parks. Children played in streets. “Little

Italy” or “Chinatown” provided exotic attractions for all.

Amusement parks and sporting events drew huge

throngs. In New York City, a journalist reported in 1883, a

“huge conglomerate mass” came together in public

spaces to form a “vague and vast harmony.”

But city life was not for all. In 1900, 50 percent more

Americans lived in rural areas than in urban areas—even

when “urban” was generously defined as holding more

than 2,500 people. Why, asked sociologist Henry Fletcher

in 1895, do “large masses of people, apparently against

their own interests,” abandon the nation’s healthful and

sociable rural areas and crowd into the nation’s disease-

ridden, anonymous cities?

■Middle-Class Life

■Skilled and Unskilled Workers

■Working Women

■Working-Class Family Life

■Working-Class Attitudes

■Working Your Way Up

■The “New” Immigration

■New Immigrants Face

New Nativism

■The Expanding City and

Its Problems

■Teeming Tenements

■The Cities Modernize

■Leisure Activities: More Fun

and Games

■Christianity’s Conscience and

the Social Gospel

■The Settlement Houses

■Civilization and Its

Discontents

■Debating the Past:

Did Immigrants Assimilate?

■Mapping the Past:

Cholera: A New Disease

Strikes the Nation

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