Readings: Boyer, Paul S. et al. The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People

Chapter 19: Immigration, Urbanization, and the Transformation of Popular Culture and Everyday Life, 1860-1900

Discussion Questions:

1. Explain the Victorian genteel tradition in the arts. Discuss the writers, painters, architects, and social scientists who broke with it in the late nineteenth century.
2. Between 1870 and 1900 nearly 11 million immigrants entered the United States. Discuss who came, why they came, where they settled, how they fared, and the impact they had on urban America.
3. Discuss the rise of the urban political machines and bosses. Why did they emerge? What roles did they play? Who supported them and why? Who fought them and why?
4. Discuss the Victorian view of the role of women. How did the so-called new woman of the late nineteenth century challenge the Victorian ideal? Which women were the most affected by the new-woman patterns? Which were least affected by the changes?

5. Discuss the varied responses of nineteenth-century middle-class reformers to urban ethnic diversity, poverty, and crime.

Identifications:

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

“old immigrants” and “new immigrants”

Castle Garden and Ellis Island

“dumbbell tenements”

Tammany Hall

“Big Jim” Pendergast

William Marcy Tweed

Thomas Nast

Charles Loring Brace and the Children's Aid Society

Charity Organization Society

Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and the Social Gospel

Jane Addams and Hull House

John Harvey Kellogg and Charles W. Post

Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Warren Sears

F. W. Woolworth

Rowland H. Macy, John Wanamaker, and Marshall Field

Charles W. Eliot

Scott Joplin and ragtime

Henry James

Stephen Crane and the naturalists

Frank Lloyd Wright

Women’s Christian Temperance Union