The Lure of the City

• The development of large, steam-powered ocean liners created a highly competitive shipping industry, allowing Europeans and Asians to cross the oceans to America much more cheaply and quickly than they had in the past.

Migrations

• Among those leaving rural America for industrial cities in the late nineteenth century were young rural women, for whom opportunities in the farm economy were limited

• Farm women had once been essential for making clothes and other household goods, but those goods were now available in stores or through catalogs.

• Hundreds of thousands of women moved to the cities, therefore, in search of work and community.

• Southern blacks were also beginning what would be a nearly century-long exodus from the countryside into the cities.

• Factory jobs for blacks were rare, and professional opportunities were almost nonexistent.

• Urban blacks tended to work as cooks, janitors, domestic servants, and in other low-paying service occupations.

• Because many such jobs were considered women’s work, black women often outnumbered black men in the cities.

• By the end of the nineteenth century, there were substantial African American communities (10,000 people or more)

• In earlier stages of immigration, most new immigrants from Europe (with the exception of the Irish) were at least modestly prosperous and educated.

• Germans and Scandinavians in particular had headed west on their arrival, either to farm or to work as businessmen, merchants, professionals, or skilled laborers in midwestern cities such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

• Most of the new immigrants of the late nineteenth century, however, lacked the capital to buy farmland and lacked the education to establish themselves in professions.

• So, like the poor Irish immigrants before the Civil War, they settled overwhelmingly in industrial cities, where most of them took unskilled jobs.

The Ethnic City

• By 1890, the population of some major urban areas consisted of a majority of foreign-born immigrants and their children

• Equally striking was the diversity of the new immigrant populations.

• In other countries experiencing heavy immigration in this period, most of the new arrivals were coming from one or two sources

• Most of the new immigrants were rural people, and their adjustment to city life was often painful.

• To help ease the transition, many national groups formed close-knit ethnic communities within the cities

• Some ethnic neighborhoods consisted of people who had migrated to America from the same province, town, or village.

• The cultural cohesiveness of the ethnic communities clearly eased the pain of separation from the immigrants’ native lands.

Assimilation

• Despite the substantial differences among the various immigrant communities, virtually all groups of the foreign-born had certain things in common.

• Most immigrants, of course, shared the experience of living in cities

• Most were young; the majority of newcomers were between fifteen and forty-five years old.

• And in virtually all communities of foreign-born immigrants, the strength of ethnic ties had to compete against another powerful force: the desire for assimilation.

• Many of the new arrivals from abroad had come to America with romantic visions of the New World

• first-generation immigrants worked hard to rid themselves of all vestiges of their old cultures, to become thoroughly Americanized.

• Second-generation immigrants were even more likely to attempt to break with the old ways, to try to assimilate completely into what they considered the real American culture

• The urge to assimilate put a particular strain on relations between men and women in immigrant communities.

• Many of the foreign-born came from cultures in which women were more subordinate to men, and more fully lodged within the family, than most women in the United States

• Assimilation was not entirely a matter of choice.

• Native-born Americans encouraged it, both deliberately and inadvertently, in countless ways.

• Public schools taught children English, and employers often insisted that workers speak English on the job.

• Although there were merchants in immigrant communities who sold ethnically distinctive foods and clothing, most stores by necessity sold mainly American products, forcing immigrants to adapt their diets, wardrobes, and lifestyles to American norms

Exclusion

• The arrival of so many new immigrants, and the way many of them clung to old ways and created culturally distinctive communities, provoked fear and resentment among some native-born Americans, just as earlier arrivals had done.

• Some people reacted against the immigrants out of generalized fears and prejudices, seeing in their “foreignness” the source of all the disorder and corruption of the urban world

• American Protective Association. Its sophisticated nativism made it possible for many educated, middle-class people to support the restrictionist cause.

• In 1882 Congress had responded to strong anti-Asian sentiment in California and elsewhere and restricted Chinese immigration, even though the Chinese made up only 1.2 percent of the population of the West Coast

• Congress denied entry to “undesirables”—convicts, paupers, the mentally incompetent—and placed a tax of 50 cents on each person admitted.

• Later legislation of the 1890s enlarged the list of those barred from immigrating and increased the tax.

• These laws kept out only a small number of aliens, however, and more-ambitious restriction proposals made little progress.

• Congress passed a literacy requirement for immigrants in 1897, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed it.

• The restrictions had limited success because many native-born Americans, far from fearing immigration, welcomed it and exerted strong political pressure against the restrictionists.

• Immigration was providing a rapidly growing economy with a cheap and plentiful labor supply; many employers argued that America’s industrial (and indeed agricultural) development would be impossible without it.

18.1: The Urban Landscape

The Creation of Public Space

• In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cities had generally grown up haphazardly, with little central planning.

• By the mid-nineteenth century, however, reformers, planners, architects, and others began to call for a more ordered vision of the city.

• The result was the self-conscious creation of public spaces and public services.

• Among the most important innovations of the mid-nineteenth century were great urban parks, which reflected the desire of a growing number of urban leaders to provide an antidote to the congestion of the city landscape

• At the same time that cities were creating great parks, they were also creating great public buildings: libraries, art galleries, natural history museums, theaters, concert halls, and opera houses.

• New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was only the largest and best known of many great museums taking shape in the late nineteenth century; others were created in such cities as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

• Wealthy residents of cities were the principal force behind the creation of the great public buildings and at times even parks.

• As the size and aspirations of the great cities increased, urban leaders launched monumental projects to remake the way their cities looked.

• Inspired by massive city rebuilding projects in Paris, London, Berlin, and other European cities, some American cities began to clear away older neighborhoods and streets and create grand, monumental avenues lined with new, more impressive buildings.

• The effort to remake the city did not just focus on redesigning the existing landscape.

• It occasionally led to the creation of entirely new ones

Housing the Well to Do

• One of the greatest problems of this precipitous growth was finding housing for the thousands of new residents who were pouring into the cities every day.

• For the prosperous, however, housing was seldom a worry.

• The availability of cheap labor and the reduced cost of the building let anyone with even a moderate income afford a house.

• The moderately well-to-do (and as time went on, increasing numbers of wealthy people as well) took advantage of the less expensive land on the edges of the city and settled in new suburbs, linked to the downtowns by trains or streetcars or improved roads.

• Real estate developers worked to create and promote suburban communities that would appeal to nostalgia for the countryside that many city dwellers felt.

• Affluent suburbs, in particular, were notable for lawns, trees, and houses designed to look manorial.

• Even modest communities strove to emphasize the opportunities suburbs provided for owning land

Housing Workers and the Poor

• Most urban residents, however, could not afford either to own a house in the city or to move to the suburbs.

• Instead, they stayed in the city centers and rented.

• Because demand was so high and space so scarce, they had little bargaining power in the process.

• Landlords tried to squeeze as many rent-paying residents as possible into the smallest available space.

• In Manhattan, for example, the average population density in 1894 was 143 people per acre—a higher rate than that of the most crowded cities of Europe

• Landlords were reluctant to invest much in immigrant housing, confident they could rent dwellings for a profit regardless of their conditions.

• The word “tenement” had originally referred simply to a multiple-family rental building, but by the late nineteenth century, it was being used to describe slum dwellings only.

• The first tenements, built in New York City in 1850, had been hailed as a great improvement in housing for the poor.

• “It is built with the design of supplying the laboring people with cheap lodgings,” a local newspaper commented, “and will have many advantages over the cellars and other miserable abodes which too many are forced to inhabit.”

• But tenements themselves soon became “miserable abodes,” with many windowless rooms, little or no plumbing or central heating, and often a row of privies in the basement.

• A New York state law of 1870 required a window in every bedroom of tenements built after that date; developers compiled by adding small, sunless air shafts to their buildings.

• Most of all, tenements were incredibly crowded, with three, four, and, sometimes many more people crammed into each small room

Urban Transportation

• Urban growth posed monumental transportation challenges.

• Old downtown streets were often too narrow for the heavy traffic that was beginning to move over them.

• Most were without a hard, paved surface producing either a sea of mud or a cloud of dust

• But it was not simply the conditions of the streets that impeded urban transportation.

• It was the numbers of people who needed to move every day from one part of the city to another, numbers that mandated the development of mass transportation.

• Streetcars drawn on tracks by horses had been introduced into some cities even before the Civil War.

• But the horsecars were not fast enough, so many communities developed new forms of mass transit.

• In 1870, New York opened its first elevated railway, whose noisy, filthy steam-powered trains moved rapidly above the city streets on massive iron structures.

• New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities also experimented with cable cars, towed by continuously moving underground cables.

• In 1897, Boston opened the first American subway when it put some of its trolley lines underground.

• At the same time, cities were developing new techniques of road and bridge-building.

• One of the great technological marvels of the 1880s was the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, a dramatic steel cable suspension span designed by John A. Roebling

The “Skyscraper”

• Cities were growing upward as well as outward.

• Until the mid-nineteenth century, almost no buildings more than four or five stories high could be constructed.

• Construction techniques were such that it was difficult and expensive to build adequate structural supports for tall buildings.

• There was also a limit to the number of flights of stairs the users of buildings could be expected to climb.

• But by the 1850s, there had been successful experiments with machine-powered passenger elevators; and by the 1870s, new methods of construction using cast iron and steel beams made it easier to build tall buildings.

• Not long after the Civil War, therefore, tall buildings began to appear in the major cities

• With each passing decade, the size and number of tall buildings increased until, by the 1890s, the term “skyscraper” became a popular description of them.

18.2: Strains of Urban Life

Fire and Disease

• One serious problem was fires.

• In one major city after another, fires destroyed large downtown areas, where many buildings were still constructed of wood.

• Chicago and Boston suffered “great fires” in 1871

• The great fires were terrible and deadly experiences, but they also encouraged the construction of fireproof buildings and the development of professional fire departments.

• They also forced cities to rebuild at a time when new technological and architectural innovations were available.

• Some of the modern, high-rise downtowns of American cities arose out of the rubble of great fires

Environmental Degradation

• Modern notions of environmentalism were unknown to most Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• But the environmental degradation of many American cities was a visible and disturbing fact of life in those years.

• The frequency of great fires, the dangers of disease and plague, the extraordinary crowding of working-class neighborhoods were all examples of the environmental costs of industrialization and rapid urbanization.

• Improper disposal of human and industrial waste was a common feature of almost all large cities in these years.

• Such practices contributed to the pollution of rivers and lakes and also, in many cases, to the compromising of the city’s drinking water.

• This was particularly true in poor neighborhoods with primitive plumbing (and sometimes no indoor plumbing), outdoor privies that leaked into the groundwater, and overcrowded tenements.

• The presence of domestic animals—horses, which were the principal means of transportation until the late nineteenth century, but in poor neighborhoods also cows, pigs, and other animals— contributed as well to the environmental problems.

• Air quality in many cities was poor as well.

• Few Americans had the severe problems that London experienced in these years with its perpetual “fogs” created by the debris from the burning of soft coal.

• But air pollution from factories and from stoves and furnaces in offices, homes, and other buildings was constant and at times severe.

• The incidence of respiratory infection and related diseases was much higher in cities than it was in nonurban areas, and it accelerated rapidly in the late nineteenth century.

• By the early twentieth century, reformers were actively crusading to improve the environmental conditions of cities and were beginning to achieve some notable successes.

• By 1910, most large American cities had constructed sewage disposal systems, often at great cost, to protect the drinking water of their inhabitants and to prevent the great bacterial plagues that impure water had helped create in the past—such as the 1873 yellow fever epidemic in Memphis that killed more than 5,000 people.

• The creation of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in 1970, which gave the government the authority to require employers to create safe and healthy workplaces, was a legacy of the Public Health Service’s early work.

Urban Poverty

• Above all, perhaps, the expansion of the cities created widespread and often desperate poverty.

• Despite the rapid growth of urban economies, the sheer number of new residents ensured that many people would be unable to earn enough for a decent subsistence.

• Public agencies and private philanthropic organizations offered very limited relief.

• They were generally dominated by middle-class people, who tended to believe that too much assistance would breed dependency and that poverty was the fault of the poor themselves—a result of laziness or alcoholism

• Other charitable societies—for example, the Salvation Army, which began operating in America in 1879, one year after it was founded in London—concentrated more on religious revivalism than on the relief of the homeless and hungry.

• Middle-class people grew particularly alarmed over the rising number of poor children in the cities, some of them orphans or runaways, living alone or in small groups scrounging for food.

• These “street Arabs,” as they were often called, attracted more attention from reformers than any other group—although that attention produced no serious solutions to their problems.

Crime and Violence

• Poverty and crowding naturally bred crime and violence.

• Much of it was relatively minor, the work of pickpockets, con artists, swindlers, and petty thieves.

• But some were more dangerous.

• The American murder rate rose rapidly in the late nineteenth century

• The rising crime rates encouraged many cities to develop larger and more professional police forces

• Machines were also vehicles for making money.

• Politicians enriched themselves and their allies through various forms of graft and corruption

• Middle-class critics saw the corrupt machines as blights on the cities and obstacles to progress.

• In fact, political organizations were often responsible not just for corruption, but also for modernizing city infrastructures, for expanding the role of government, and for creating stability in a political and social climate that otherwise would have lacked a center

18.3: The Rise of Mass Consumption

Patterns of Income and Consumption

• American industry could not have grown as it did without the expansion of markets.

• The growth of demand occurred at almost all levels of society, a result not just of the new techniques of production and mass distribution that were making consumer goods less expensive, but also of rising incomes.

• Incomes in the industrial era were rising for almost everyone, although at highly uneven rates.

• The salaries of clerks, accountants, middle managers, and other “white-collar” workers rose on average by a third between 1890 and 1910—and in some parts of the middle class, salaries rose by much more.

• Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, for example, experienced a particularly dramatic increase in the prestige and profitability of their professions.

• Working-class incomes rose too in those years, although from a much lower base and considerably more slowly.

• Iron- and steelworkers, despite the setbacks their unions suffered, saw their hourly wages increase by a third between 1890 and 1910; but industries with large female, African American, or Mexican workforces—shoes, textiles, paper, laundries, many areas of commercial agriculture—saw very small increases, as did almost all industries in the South.

• Also important to the new mass market were the development of affordable products and the creation of new merchandising techniques, which made many consumer goods available to a broad market for the first time

• New homes, even modest ones, now included clothes closets.

• Even people in remote rural areas could develop stylish wardrobes by ordering from the new mail-order houses.

• Another example of the rise of the mass market was the way Americans bought and prepared food.

• The development and mass production of tin cans in the 1880s created a large new industry devoted to packaging and selling canned food

• The development of artificially frozen ice made it possible for many more households to afford iceboxes.

• Among other things, the changes meant improved diets and better health; life expectancy rose six years in the first two decades of the twentieth century

Chain Stores and Mail-order Houses

• Changes in marketing also altered the way Americans bought goods. Small local stores faced competition from new “chain stores.”

• The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A & P) began creating a national network of grocery stores as early as the 1850s and expanded it rapidly after the Civil War

• Chain stores were able to sell manufactured goods at lower prices than the local, independent stores because the chains had so much more volume.

• But most customers, however loyal they might feel to a local merchant, found it difficult to resist the greater variety and lower prices the chains provided them.

• Chain stores were slow to reach remote, rural areas, which remained dependent on poorly stocked and often very expensive country stores.

• But rural people gradually gained access to the new consumer world through the great mail-order houses.

Department Stores

• In larger cities, the emergence of great department stores (which had appeared earlier in Europe) helped transform buying habits and turn shopping into an alluring and glamorous activity

• Department stores transformed the concept of shopping in several ways.

• First, they brought together under one roof an enormous array of products that had previously been sold in separate shops.

• Second, they sought to create an atmosphere of wonder and excitement, to make shopping a glamorous activity.

• Department stores were elaborately decorated to suggest great luxury and elegance.

• They included restaurants and tearooms and comfortable lounges, to suggest that shopping could be a social event as well as a practical necessity.

• They hired well-dressed salesclerks, mostly women, to provide attentive service to their mostly female customers.

• Third, department stores—like mail-order houses—took advantage of economies of scale to sell merchandise at lower prices than many of the individual shops with which they competed.

Women as Consumers

• The rise of mass consumption had particularly dramatic effects on American women.

• Women’s clothing styles changed much more rapidly and dramatically than men’s, which encouraged frequent purchases.

• Women generally bought and prepared food for their families, so the availability of new food products changed not only the way everyone ate but also the way women shopped and cooked.

• The consumer economy produced new employment opportunities for women as sales clerks in department stores and as waitresses in the rapidly proliferating restaurants.

• Industrial workers might still be on the job six days a week, but many of them had more time off in the evenings.

• Even farmers found that the mechanization of agriculture gave them more free time.

• The lives of many Americans were becoming compartmentalized, with clear distinctions between work and leisure.

18.4: Leisure in the Consumer Society

Redefining Leisure

• The growth of free time produced a redefinition of the idea of “leisure.”

• In earlier eras, relatively few Americans had considered leisure a valuable thing. On the contrary, many equated it with laziness or sloth.

• “Rest,” as in the relative inactivity many Americans considered appropriate for the Sabbath, was valued because it offered time for spiritual reflection and prepared people for work.

• But leisure—time spent amusing oneself in nonproductive pursuits—was not only unavailable to most Americans but faintly scorned as well

• Industrial workers, in pursuit of shorter hours, adopted the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.”

• Others were equally adamant in claiming that leisure time was both a right and an important contribution to an individual’s emotional and even spiritual health.

• The economist Simon Patten was one of the first intellectuals to articulate this new view of leisure, which he tied closely to the rising interest in consumption

• As Americans became more accustomed to leisure as a normal part of their lives, they began to look for new experiences with which to entertain themselves.

• Entertainment usually meant “going out,” spending leisure time in public places where there would be not only entertainment but also other people.

• Mass entertainment did not always bridge differences of class, race, or gender.

• Saloons and most sporting events tended to be male preserves. Shopping (itself becoming a valued leisure-time activity) and going to tearooms and luncheonettes were more characteristic of female leisure.

• Theaters, pubs, and clubs were often specific to particular ethnic communities or particular workgroups.

• There were, in fact, relatively few places where people of widely diverse backgrounds gathered together.

Spectator Sports

• The search for forms of public leisure hastened the rise of organized spectator sports, especially baseball, which by the end of the century was well on its way to becoming the national pastime

• A game much like baseball, known as “rounders” and derived from cricket, had enjoyed limited popularity in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century.

• Versions of the game began to appear in America in the early 1830s, well before Abner Doubleday supposedly “invented” baseball.

• By the end of the Civil War, interest in baseball had grown rapidly.

• More than 200 amateur or semi-professional teams or clubs existed, many of which joined a national association and agreed on standard rules.

• The first salaried team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed in 1869.

• The second most popular game, football, appealed at first to an elite segment of the male population, in part because it originated in colleges and universities.

• The first intercollegiate football game in America occurred between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, and soon the game became entrenched as part of collegiate life

• As college football grew in popularity, it spread to other sections of the country, notably to the midwestern state universities, which were destined soon to replace the eastern schools as the great powers of the game

• Other popular spectator sports were emerging at about the same time. Basketball was invented in 1891 at Springfield, Massachusetts, by Dr. James A. Naismith, a Canadian working as athletic director for a local college.

• Boxing, which had long been a disreputable activity

• Horse racing, popular since colonial times, became increasingly commercialized with the construction of large tracks and the establishment of large-purse races such as the Kentucky Derby.

• Even in their infancy, spectator sports were closely associated with gambling.

• There was elaborate betting—some of it organized by underground gambling syndicates—on baseball and football almost from the start.

• The rise of spectator sports and gambling was largely a response to the desire of men to create a distinctively male culture in cities.

• But not all sports were the province of men.

• A number of sports were emerging in which women became important participants.

• Golf and tennis seldom attracted crowds in the late nineteenth century, but both experienced a rapid increase in participation among relatively wealthy men and women.

• Bicycling and croquet also enjoyed widespread popularity in the 1890s among women as well as men.

• Women’s colleges were beginning to introduce their students to strenuous sports as well

Music and Theater

• Many ethnic communities maintained their own theaters, in which immigrants listened to the music of their homelands and heard comedians making light of their experiences in the New World.

• Italian theaters often drew on the traditions of Italian opera to create sentimental musical events.

• Urban theaters also introduced one of the most distinctively American entertainment forms: the musical comedy, which evolved gradually from the comic operettas of the European theater

• Vaudeville, a form of theater adapted from French models, was the most popular urban entertainment in the first decades of the twentieth century.

• Even saloons and small community theaters could afford to offer their customers vaudeville, which consisted of a variety of acts

The Movies

• The most important form of mass entertainment (until the invention of the radio and television) was the movies.

• Thomas Edison and others had created the technology of the motion picture in the 1880s.

• Not long after, short films became available to individual viewers through “peep shows” in pool halls, penny arcades, and amusement parks.

• Soon larger projectors made it possible to project the images onto big screens, which permitted substantial audiences to see films in theaters.

• By 1900, Americans were becoming attracted in large numbers to these early movies—usually plotless films of trains or waterfalls or other spectacles designed mainly to show off the technology

Working-class Leisure

• Leisure had particular importance to working-class men and women—in part because it was a relatively new part of their lives and in part, because it stood in such sharp contrast to the grueling environments in which many industrial workers labored.

• More than most other groups in society, workers spent their leisure time on the streets—walking alone or in groups, watching street entertainers, meeting friends, talking and joking

• Saloons were often ethnically specific, in part because they served particular neighborhoods dominated by particular national groups.

• They also became political centers. Saloon Keepers were especially important figures in urban political machines, largely because they had regular contact with so many men in a neighborhood

• Boxing was a particularly popular sport among working-class men.

The Fourth of July

• The Fourth of July played a large role in the lives of many working-class Americans.

• That was in part because in an age of six-day (and sometimes seven-day) workweeks and before regular vacations, it was for many decades one of the few full days of leisure—other than the Sabbath, during which activities were often restricted by law—that many workers had.

• Fourth of July celebrations were one of the highlights of the year in many ethnic, working-class communities

Mass Communications

• Urban industrial society created a vast market for new methods of transmitting news and information.

• Between 1870 and 1910, the circulation of daily newspapers increased nearly ninefold

• One striking change was the emergence of national press services, which made use of the telegraph to supply news and features to papers throughout the country and which contributed as a result to the standardization of the product

• Joseph Pulitzer helped popularize what became known as “yellow journalism”—a deliberately sensational, often lurid style of reporting presented in bold graphics, designed to reach a mass audience

• Beginning in the 1880s, new kinds of magazines appeared that were designed for a mass audience.

• One of the pioneers was Edward W. Bok, who took over the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1899 and, by targeting a mass female audience, built its circulation to over 700,000.

18.5: High Culture in the Age of the City

The Literature of Urban America

• One of the strongest impulses in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature was the effort to re-create urban social reality

• Other critics of American society responded to the new civilization not by attacking it but by withdrawing from it.

• The growing popularity of literature helped spawn a remarkable network of clubs, mostly formed and populated by women, to bring readers together to talk about books.

• Reading clubs proliferate rapidly in cities and even small towns, among African American as well as white women.

• They made literature a social experience for hundreds of thousands of women and created a tradition that has continued into the twenty-first century.

Art in the Age of the City

• American art through most of the nineteenth century had been overshadowed by the art of Europe.

• Many American artists studied and even lived in Europe.

• But others broke from the Old World traditions and experimented with new styles.

• By the first years of the new century, some American artists were turning decisively away from the traditional academic style, a style perhaps best exemplified in America by the brilliant portraitist John Singer Sargent

• The work of these and other artists marked the beginning in America of an artistic movement known as modernism, a movement that had counterparts in many other areas of cultural and intellectual life as well.

The Impact of Darwinism

• The single most profound intellectual development in the late nineteenth century was the widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution, associated most prominently with the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

• Darwinism argued that the human species had evolved from earlier forms of life (and most recently from simian creatures similar to apes) through a process of “natural selection.”

• The theory of evolution met widespread resistance at first from educators, theologians, and even many scientists.

• By the end of the century, however, the evolutionists had converted most members of the urban professional and educated classes.

• Unseen by most urban Americans at the time, however, the rise of Darwinism was contributing to a deep schism between the new, cosmopolitan culture of the city—which was receptive to new ideas such as evolution—and a traditional, provincial culture located mainly (although not wholly) in rural areas—which remained wedded to fundamentalist religious beliefs and older values.

• Darwinism helped spawn other new intellectual currents.

• The relativistic implications of Darwinism also promoted the growth of anthropology and encouraged some scholars to begin examining other cultures—most significantly, perhaps, the culture of American Indians—in new ways.

• A few white Americans began to look at Indian society as a coherent culture with its own norms and values that were worthy of respect and preservation, even though different from those of white society.

• But such ideas about Native Americans found very little support outside a few corners of the intellectual world until much later in the twentieth century.

Toward Universal Schooling

• A society that was coming to depend increasingly on specialized skills and scientific knowledge was, of course, a society with a high demand for education.

• The late nineteenth century, therefore, was a time of rapid expansion and reform of American schools and universities.

• One example was the spread of free public primary and secondary education

• By 1900, compulsory school attendance laws were in effect in thirty-one states and territories.

• But education was still far from universal.

• Rural areas lagged far behind urban-industrial ones in funding public education.

• And in the South, many blacks had no access to schools

• Colleges and universities were also proliferating rapidly in the late nineteenth century.

• They benefited particularly from the Morrill Land Grant Act of the Civil War era, by which the federal government had donated land to states for the establishment of colleges

• Other universities benefited from millions of dollars contributed by business and financial tycoons.

• Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others gave generously to such schools as the University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Syracuse, and Yale.

• Other philanthropists founded new universities or reorganized and renamed older ones to perpetuate their family names—Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Duke, Tulane, and Stanford.

Education for Women

• The post–Civil War era saw, too, an important expansion of educational opportunities for women, although such opportunities continued to lag far behind those available to men and were almost always denied to black women.

• Most public high schools accepted women readily, but opportunities for higher education were few.

• At the end of the Civil War, only three American colleges were coeducational.

• In the years after the war, some of the land-grant colleges and universities in the Midwest and such private universities as Cornell and Wesleyan began to admit women along with men.

• But coeducation provided fewer opportunities than the creation of a network of women's colleges

• The female college was part of an important phenomenon in the history of modern American women: the emergence of a distinctive women's community.

• Most faculty members and many administrators were women (often unmarried).

• And the life of the college produced a spirit of sorority and commitment among educated women that had important effects in later years, as women became the leaders of many reform activities.

• Most female college graduates eventually married, but many married at a later age than their non-college-educated counterparts and in some cases continued to pursue careers after marriage and motherhood.

• A significant minority, perhaps over 25 percent, did not marry but devoted themselves exclusively to careers