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Bringing the City Back In: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

James Connolly
James Connolly
Affiliation:
Ball State University
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Extract

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward sought to understand the social consequences of industrialization by looking at a city. One of the Gilded Age's best-selling books, the Utopian novel magically transported lead character Julian West to a futuristic Boston set in the year 2000 and contrasted that ideal, cooperative world with the harsh reality of individualism-drenched, industrial Boston in 1887. Bellamy's vision of a twenty-first-century city was prescient about technology: it included automation, mass communication, and swift transportation. His social predictions proved less successful. Boston in the year 2000 was populated by Victorian ladies and gentlemen and lacked the cultural variety we associate with contemporary city life.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 258 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2002

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References

Thanks to Robert Johnston, Dan Goffman, Maureen Flanagan, and the anonymous JGAPE reader for helpful comments and suggestions.

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26 Ibid., 710. Mohl, “City and Region” is one response to Tilly.

27 Wingerd, Mary Lethert, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, 2001).Google Scholar Wingerd's book was published too late for inclusion in this article. The discussion below is based on her dissertation.

28 Wingerd, “City Limits.”

29 Ibid., 3.

30 Conzen, Kathleen Neils, et al. “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–42.Google Scholar See also Conzen, , “Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11 (September 1991): 5–21Google Scholar for a discussion of the importance of local context for understanding ethnic experience. Examples of place-conscious local studies of ethnic life include Emmons, David M., The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar; Mormino, Gary R. and Pozzetta, George E., The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; Sanchez, George J., Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicane Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Kazal, Russell Andrew, “Becoming ‘Old Stock’: The Waning of German-American Identity in Philadelphia, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998).Google Scholar

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