Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City

1. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • How did the growth of cities and the influx of immigrants create a new awareness of ethnic and class differences? • How were racial stereotypes used to reinforce these distinctions?

2. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Growth of American Cities between 1870 – 1900. • See Table. 19-1 Urban Growth: 1870-1900, p. 577 • In 1900 New York’s 3.4 million inhabitants almost equaled the nation’s entire 1850 urban population

3. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Urban Growth • Migration from countryside • Nearly 11 million foreign immigrants between 1870 and 1900

4. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Urban Growth = Fertile soil economic growth • Growing cities create new jobs and new markets • Dramatically stimulate national economic expansion

5. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • City’s diversity threatened traditional expectations about community life and social stability • Cities – immigrant groups competed with each other and native-born Americans for jobs, power, and influence • Services were strained • Housing and sanitation problems • Accentuated class differences

6. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Complaints of Native-born American • Noise, stench, and congestion of cityscape • Squalid tenements • Newcomers fondness for drink and strange social customs • When reformers wanted to clean up the environment, they also wanted to destroy distinctive customs

7. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • Growing concentration of Industries produced demands for new workers • Pull Factors – good wages and broad range of jobs (some farm communities vanished from the map)

8. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • Mechanization made farming even more a “mans job” • Women led the exodus from the farm to the city • Mail order catalogs reduced rural needs for women’s labor on subsistence tasks • Young farm women in cities competed with immigrant, black and city born white women

9. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • 1860 to 1890 – prospect of a better life also attracted nearly 10 million northern European immigrants to East Coast and Midwestern cities. • Germans – close to 3,000,000 • English, Scottish, and Welsh – nearly 2,000,000 • Irish – 1,500,000 • French-Canadians 800,000 • Scandinavian – close to 1,000,000

10. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – more than 81,000 Chinese remained in California and nearby states in 1900.

11. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • “old immigrants” from northern and western Europe • “new immigrants” Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, Armenians from the Middle ease, and in Hawaii, Japanese from Asia

12. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • Immigrants – settled in the city • Irish in New England • Germans in the Midwest • Immigrants forced from homeland for: overpopulation, crop failure, famine, religious persecution, violence, or industrial depression. (push factors)

13. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • Migrants and Immigrants • England – Economic downturn • German – overpopulation and church reorganization • Others came for better opportunities • Hawaii – Japanese Lucrative sugar plantations high wages Some returned home with money.

14. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City • 1855 – NY State – Castle Garden • 1892 - Federal Government – Ellis Island • 1910 – San Francisco Bay – Angel Island • Immigrant Processing Centers