Why .........?

Question

did american cities grow so rapidly in the late 1800's? How were the cities impacted socially, econmically, and politically??

Answer 1

Historians have examined the occupational and social structures of American cities in the Revolutionary Era and the early National Period for several reasons. For example, Gary Nash argues the cities were the "crucibles" of the political consciousness which led to the American Revolution, and part of the source of that consciousness was growing urban economic inequality and class tensions.(1) Other scholars document these trends both during the Revolutionary Era and in the decades immediately after. They also argue that increasing economic inequality reflected emerging class differences and shaped urban political and social life.(2) Historians seeking a bottom-up view of urban life, as a counterbalance to the history of urban elites, depend on occupational, economic, and demographic statistics to describe the working population because of the paucity of literary evidence from ordinary people.(3) Finally, historians of working-class formation look at the occupational structures of early American cities to pinpoint the beginnings of the working class.(4)

Nearly all of these endeavors employ, at least in part, quantitative measures of occupational structure, income, or property holdings, almost always based on the three most accessible sources of such information: tax lists, city directories, and probate court inventories of wills. Nash, for example, uses tax lists and inventories of wills to calculate a variety of statistical measures of income distribution, property distribution, and occupational structure...    

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst...

http://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/ecities....

http://www.realestatedeveloper.com/famou...

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-00...

http://carterwisc.ist-in-koeln.de/americ...

http://www.historycooperative.org/journa...