Nineteenth-Century Urbanization Patterns in the United States

Urbanization of the United States in the nineteenth century has been described in numerous scholarly texts. As Eric Lampard, writing in 1961, pointed out, “… the urban-industrial transformation [has] now become part of the furniture displayed in every up-to-date textbook of U.S. history.…” Yet, as the same author had pointed out six years earlier, at that time “no systematic study has ever been made of the role of cities in recent [as opposed to medieval] economic development. We are still unable to counter the charge that cities are ‘abnormal’ and ‘costly’ with any account of the ways in which they have actually facilitated, let alone fostered, progressive economic change.” Obviously, since 1955 significant progress has been made towards filling this lacuna.