01:512:104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Baltimore And Ohio Railroad, Triangular Trade, Residential Segregation In The United States
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16 May 2018
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Chapter 13 - Coming to Terms with the New Age
The Preindustrial City
- Wealthy enjoyed unquestioned authority
- Merchants regulated public markets, set prices for foodstuffs
- Same wealthy men who established watch societies to prevent disorder
The Growth of Cities
- 1820-1860 - Population living in cities increased from 7% to 20%,
- NY grew from 60,000 in 1800 to 202,600 in 1830 and to more than 1 mil
in 1860; emerged as nation’s largest port, financial center
- Erie Canal added commerce with interior to NY’s trade
- Philadelphia, countering the Erie Canal, financed the B&O railroad
- Boston, emerged as center of triangular trade:
- Boston ships carried cloth, shoes, to South, sent southern cotton to Europe,
then returned to Boston with European manufactured goods
- 1850s - New Orleans handled about half the nation’s cotton exports
- Exports rose from 5 mil in 1815, to 107 mil
- Railroad transformed Chicago into a major junction of water and rail
transport
Patterns of Immigration
- Surge in immigration to US began in 1820s accelerated dramatically after
1830
- By 1860 nearly half of New York’s population was foreign born
- Most immigrants from Ireland and Germany
- Political unrest, poor economic conditions in Germany
- Potato Famine in Ireland
- Clash btwn Catholic immigrants and Protestant Americans
Class Structure in Cities
- Benefits of market revolution were unequally distributed: by 1840s top 1%
of pop owned about 40% of nation’s wealth; 1/3 of pop owned virtually
nothing
Sanitation and Living Patterns
- Every American city suffered epidemics of sanitation-related diseases
- cholera, yellow fever, typhus
- Provision of municipal services forced residential segregation
- By 1850s middles class escaped cities, moving to ‘streetcar suburbs’
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- Due to influx of European immigrants after 1830s, middle-class saw slums
as homes of strange foreign people who deserved less than American born
citizens
Ethnic Neighborhoods
- Slums represented family ties, familiar ways and community support to Irish
- Irish immigrants created their own communities in Boston and NY
- eg. parochial schools with Irish nuns
- Mutual aid societies based on kinship or town of origin in Ireland
- Boston American remarked “foreign population associating too exclusively
with each other, living in groups together”
Urban Popular Culture
- 1820-1860, urban workers experienced:
- replacement of artisanal labor by wage work
- two serious depressions (1837-43, 1857)
- vastly increased competition from immigrant labor
- Taverns became frequent venues of riots, brawls; theaters provided
another setting for violence
- “Bowery b’hoys”; deliberately provocative way they dressed was a way
of thumbing their noses at more respectable classes
- “penny paper”, NY Post, NY Sun, (1833), fed popular appetite for scandal
- Concerns began to arise about civic order
Civic Order
- “frolics”, members of lower classes parade through streets playing
drums, trumpets, whistles, etc
- NYC’s first response to increasing civic disorder was to hire more,
watchmen, augmented by constables and marshals
- Opposition to idea of professional police force in US; infringed personal
liberty
Urban Life of Free African Americans
- More than half of free African Americans in North compete with
poor immigrants and poor native-born whites
- Residential segregation, job discrimination, civil rights limitations
- African Methodist Episcopal (AME), one of few places where blacks
could express true feelings
The Labour Movement and Urban Politics
- Universal while manhood suffrage and mass politics changed urban politics
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find more resources at oneclass.com