Urban history facts for kids

Urban history is a field of history that studies the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. Urban history covers fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians.

The history of urbanization focuses on how existing populations concentrate themselves in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) to suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history.

Urban biography

Urban biography is the narrative history of a city, and often reaches a general audience. Urban biographies cover the interrelationships among various dimensions, such as politics, demography, business, high culture, popular culture, housing, neighborhoods, and ethnic groups. It covers municipal government as well as physical expansion, growth and decline. Historians often focus on the largest and most dominant city—usually the national capital—which geographers call a "primate city."

Some representative urban biographies are:

• Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898 (2000)
• S. G. Checkland, The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875-1975 (1981)
• Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam, The Life of a City (1972)
• Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo; 1001 Years of City Victorious (1971)
• Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (1994)
• Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878 (1962)
• Christopher Hibbert, London, the Biography of a City (1969)
• Robert Hughes, Barcelona (1992)
• Colin Jones. Paris: Biography of a City (2004)
• Blake McKelvey. Rochester (4 vol, 1961), Rochester NY
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (2012)
• Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago (3 vol 1957), to 1893.
• Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1998)
• Alexandra Ritchie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (1998)
• James Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb (1974)
• Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (1997), considers literature, music, theater, painting, and decorative arts.

Historians have developed typologies of cities, emphasizing their geographic location and economic specialization. In the United States Carl Bridenbaugh was a pioneer in the historiography. He emphasized the major port cities on the East Coast, the largest of which were Boston and Philadelphia, each with fewer than 40,000 people at the time of the American Revolution. Other historians have covered the port cities up and down the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast, along with the river ports along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Industrialization began in New England, and several small cities have scholarly histories. The railroad cities of the West, stretching from Chicago to Kansas City to Wichita to Denver have been well treated. Blake McKelvey provides an encyclopedic overview of the functions of major cities in The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (1963), and The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915-1966 (1968)

New urban history

The "new urban history" emerged in the 1960s as a branch of Social history seeking to understand the "city as process" and, through quantitative methods, to learn more about the inarticulate masses in the cities, as opposed to the mayors and elites. Much of the attention is devoted to individual behavior, and how the intermingling of classes and ethnic groups operated inside a particular city. Smaller cities are much easier to handle when it comes to tracking a sample of individuals over ten or 20 years.

Common themes include the social and political changes, examinations of class formation, and racial/ethnic tensions. A major early study was Stephan Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964), which used census records to study Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1850–1880. A seminal, landmark book, it sparked interest in the 1960s and 1970s in quantitative methods, census sources, "bottom-up" history, and the measurement of upward social mobility by different ethnic groups.

Other exemplars of the new urban history included

• Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860 (1976)
• David F. Crew. Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860-1914 (1986)
• Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (1975; 2nd ed. 2000)
• Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (1976)
• Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus Ohio 1860-1865 (1975)

There were no overarching social history theories that emerged developed to explain urban development. Inspiration from urban geography and sociology, as well as a concern with workers (as opposed to labor union leaders), families, ethnic groups, racial segregation, and women's roles have proven useful. Historians now view the contending groups within the city as "agents" who shape the direction of urbanization. The sub-field has flourished in Australia—where most people live in cities.

Demographic perspectives make use of the large volume of census data from the mid-19th century. New techniques include the use of historical GIS data.

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The study of the culture of specific cities and the role of cities in shaping national culture is a more recent development which provides nontraditional ways of "reading" cities. A representative class is Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980).

Historians are beginning to integrate urban history and environmental history. Thus far most of the attention concerns the negative impact on the environment, rather than how the environment shaped the urbanization process.

Scholarship

The Journal of Urban History has been a leading quarterly journal with articles and reviews since 1975. The Urban History Association was founded in 1988 with 284 members; it now has over 400. It sponsored the "Sixth Biennial Urban History Association Conference" in New York, October 25–28, 2012. It awards prizes for the best book prize, best article, and best PhD dissertation.

See also

In Spanish: Historia de las ciudades para niños