Social History of New York 1875-1895

Abstract

No chapter in American history of the late 19th century is more important than the shift from the farm to the city, from a society predominately agricultural to one predominately industrial. As Frederick Jackson Turner's influence recedes, historians are paying increasing attention to what the great transition involved: immigration, machine politics (that is, machine politics of a new sort), extremes of wealth and poverty, class consciousness, urban decay, cultural foment, and so on. My book re-examines some of these phenomena. It does so by focusing on a single city - one so immense that in its own affairs it faithfully reflected the national experience – and seeing precisely what happened there during the twenty or twenty-five critical years. The book is built upon a simple, but terribly important, premise. It assumes that we cannot grasp the significance of urbanization simply by citing figures on population or industrial output. The city is an ideological as well as physical concept, and the growth of cities changed America in ways that no statistic can ever measure. In the broadest sense, this is what all the chapters are about.