Chapter 1 - Antebellum Urban Publics

Summary

By several crucial measures, big-city life emerged in the United States in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As urban spaces proliferated and expanded, and as migrants from rural areas and from abroad swelled their populations, a new kind of society emerged in the nation’s largest cities. These were societies of anonymous strangers, regulated and characterized by new institutions and practices, including fixed-route public transportation, commercial nightlife, and cheap daily newspapers. Against the backdrop of this development, many of the most popular, influential, or enduring antebellum American authors took the anonymous and transitory city itself as the model for what it meant to engage or circulate in public.