Vocabulary, Pgs. 490-501
Topic/Key Terms
Significance
The Urbanization of America
 Benefits of city life (Pg. 490)
Gave women opportunity to act in ways
that would have been seen to violate
“propriety” (decency) in smaller
communities, gay individuals could build a
culture (though still hidden) and partially
experiment without persecution from
others, offered more and better-paying jobs
than in rural America or many foreign
lands. All of these aspects attracted many
citizens and immigrants to the American
cities.

Benefits of Ethnic Communities
(Pg. 494)
Offered familiar concepts to immigrants
(home language and culture, cuisine,
religion, and even fraternal organizations),
to help ease the pain of leaving their home
countries, even led to more immigration
with individuals bringing their families to
the cities.

Americanization (Pg. 495)
The process of new immigrants to America
wanting to rid themselves of all vestiges of
their old cultures, and become fully
Americanized, was supported by their
romanticism of the nation and their desire
to conform.

American Protective Association
(Pg. 496)
Founded in 1887 by Henry Bowers, group
committed to stopping the immigrant tide,
resulted from rising nativism brought on by
surge of immigration to U.S. and helped
express the American’s negative sentiments
towards foreigners.

Immigration Restriction League
(Pg. 496)
Founded same year as American Protective
Association by five Harvard alumni,
dedicated to belief that immigrants should
be screened, through literacy tests and
other standards designed to separate
desirable from undesirable, gained support
from avoiding some of the clear problems
with the American Protective Association
and had expressed more sophisticated
nativism.
The Urban Landscape
 Frederick Law Olmstead and
Calvert Vaux (Pg. 497)
Promoted parks as refuges in city
landscape, teamed with one another in late
1850s to design New York’s Central Park,
intentionally made it seem as little like city
as possible and look entirely natural, which
gave it much popularity and admiration.
Later, they designed other great parks and
public spaces (In Brooklyn, Boston,
Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington
D.C.)

1893 Colombian Exposition (Pg.
498)
Greatly inspired efforts to remake
American city of Chicago, was a world’s
fair constructed to honor 400th anniversary
of Columbus’s first voyage to America.

“City beautiful” movement (Pg.
498)
Brought on by changes made for 1893
Colombian Exposition, led by architect of
Great White City, Daniel Burnham, aimed
to impose similar order and symmetry on
disordered life of cities around the country,
followers later strove to remake cities
across the nation.

“Black Bay” (Pg. 498)
A neighborhood in Boston, created from
large area of filled in marshy tidal land,
project took more than forty years to
complete and was one of largest public
works projects ever undertaken in America
to that point.

Tenements (Pg. 499)
At first multiple-family rental buildings, by
late nineteenth century was used to
describe slum dwellings only, first were
built in New York City in 1850 and praised
as cheap lodgings to supply laborers with
some advantages, but later became
“miserable abodes” (mostly windowless,
little/no plumbing or central heating,
maybe row of privies in basement).
Changes were later made to improve on
some of these issues.

Jacob Riis (Pg. 499)
Danish immigrant and New York
newspaper reporter and photographer,
shocked many in middle-class America
with descriptions and pictures of tenement
life in How the Other Half Lives (1890),
gained support for government assistance
(raze slum dwellings, no housing to replace
them).

Equitable Building (Pg. 501)
In New York, completed in 1870 and rising
seven and a half floors above street, one of
first in nation to be built with an elevator,
influencing the construction of taller
buildings in the city and elsewhere (until
term “skyscraper” became popular
description in 1890s).

Louis Sullivan (Pg. 501)
Chicago architect, greatest figure in early
development of skyscraper, introduced
many modern functional elements (large
windows, sheer lines, limited
ornamentation) in attempt to emphasize
soaring height of building to be its most
distinctive feature, student Frank Lloyd
Wright expanded influence of innovations
further.
Comments/Connections/Questions:
 I wonder why so many immigrants were focused on becoming “Americanized”,
maybe they felt that they had to conform to those in the country they were living
in to be successful like they were? Still, I wouldn’t think that it would be good for
them to so readily abandon their own cultural beliefs.
 These new societies against immigration remind me a lot of the Know-Nothings
and their nativist views at the time of immigration into the U.S., and also it seems
very similar to today’s situation (illegal immigrants) and how people don’t want
them to enter the country at all, or want them to be tested for citizenship (much
like the proposals of the Immigration Restriction League).
 A lot of these new changes relating to the cities and urbanization sounds very
similar to things that have developed into our modern day, and so I think the views
that were established at this time of American city-life are the ones that many
might still believe in today.