America Moves to the
City

 Urbanization
 Skyscrapers (+passenger elevators)
 Electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones
Living Conditions in the
Cities

 Cities grew too fast, lacked sewage and effective
infrastructure
 Crime rates high
 Diseases spread quickly
 Tenements
Suburbanization

Immigration

 “old” and “new”
Old
vs.

New
 1800-1880
 1880-1910
 Northwestern Europe
(Ireland and Germany)
 China
 Southeastern Europe
 Settled in rural and
urban areas, worked a
variety of jobs
 Settled in cities, worked
in factories
Why so much
immigration?

 “push” vs. “pull” factors
Push factors

 1800-1900, Europe’s population doubled
 No jobs, no opportunity, no room
 Better farming methods
 Persecution (Jews in Russia)
Pull factors

 Economic opportunities
 Religious freedom
 No military conscription
Reactions to New
Immigration

 Screening, 10% of immigrants not let into America
 Once in, gov’t didn’t really do anything
 Nativism
 Political machines- “Boss” Tweed, NYC
Government Actions

 1882: no paupers, criminal, or convicts
 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
 1880s: no insane, polygamists, prostitutes, alcoholics,
anarchists, and sick
 1917: literacy test
Statue of Liberty

“Social Gospel”

 People wanted to help out suffering
immigrants/poor
Settlement Houses

 Located in cities
 Helped immigrants and poor:




Childcare services
English lessons
Education
Food & shelter
Jane Adams

 Born wealthy, educated, dedicated her life to charity
work
 Hull House (settlement house in Chicago)
 Nobel Peace Prize in 1931
Darwin

 On the Origin of Species
 Natural selection
 Caused clashes within the religious community“creation”
 Believed until the 1920s
Church splits into 2
groups:

 Fundamentalists- Bible is word for word literal
 “Accomodationists”- “modernists”
 Believed natural selection reflects a greater view of
God’s creation
Lust for Learning

 Public education:
 Grade school made mandatory by gov’t
 6,000 new high schools between 1860 and 1900
 “Kindergartens”
 “Normal Schools”
 Catholic schools
Education

 Better in cities than in rural areas
 Illiteracy rate drops from 20% to 10.7%
 South lags behind
 44% of non-whites illiterate in 1900
Higher Education

 More colleges & universities
 1 out of 3 grads are women by 1880
 African American universities (Howard)
 Morrill Act, 1862
 Donations from titans of industry: Cornell, U of Chicago,
Stanford, Vanderbilt
 First graduate school: Johns Hopkins
Changes in education

 More practical courses instead of emphasis on
“classics”
 Separation of religion and science classes
 Vocational training
Booker T. Washington
and African Americans

Booker T. Washington

 Ex-slave
 Founded Tuskegee
Institute
 Trade school for
blacks
 Goal: gain economic
security and therefore,
social respect and
equality
Controversy:

 Called an “accomodationists”
 Did not challenge white supremacy
 Avoided issue of social equality/accepted
segregation
 Developed educational and economic resources of
the black community
George Washington
Carver

 Ex-slave
 Teacher at Tuskegee
Institute
 Discovered hundreds of
new uses for peanut,
soybean, sweet potato
W.E.B. DuBois

 First Af. Am. To receive a
Ph.D.
 Harvard: historian, poet,
sociologist
 Criticized BTW for
“condemning” blacks to
inferiority
 Demanded complete and
immediate social equality
Journalism and the Press

Journalism

 Sensationalism
 Yellow journalism:
 Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst
 Push for reform: Looking Backward
The “New Morality”

Battle over sexual
attitudes in America

Victoria Woodhull
Anthony Comstock
 “free love”
 “Comstock Law”
 Ran a magazine
 “defender of purity”
 Ran for president in
1872 (first woman to
try!)
“New morality”

 Soaring divorce rates
 More birth control
 “sex o’clock in America”
Women

Families and Women in
the City

 Urban families:




More divorce
Less babies
Birth control
Delayed marriage age
NAWSA: National
American Women

Suffrage
Association
 1890
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
 Susan B. Anthony
 Carrie Chapman Catt
1869

 Wyoming gives women the right to vote
Ida B. Wells

 journalist
 Anti-lynching campaign
Prohibition of Alcohol
and Social Progress

Push for prohibition

 Liquor consumption increased after the Civil War
 National Prohibition Party, 1874
 Anti-Saloon League, 1893
Women join the fight

 “I’ll Marry No Man if He Drinks”
 “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine”
 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
Carry Nation

 “Kansas Cyclone”
The Business of
Amusement

Amusement

 Vaudeville Acts/minstrel shows
 Barnum and Baily Circus
 Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley