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Immigrant Ghetto
These were neighborhoods that attempted to recreate many features of the Old World in the New World for immigrants who were having a difficult time adjusting to city life.
Americanization
The process of an immigrant coming into the US and acquiring the American culture, value, and beliefs. Some first-generation immigrants worked hard to rid themselves of all the vestiges of their old culture. Then some of the second-generation immigrants were even more likely to break away from their old ways and try to assimilate completely into what they considered the real American culture.
Nativism
Native-born Americans became fearful and showed resentment towards the arrival of so many new immigrants. 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. Even native-born Americans of the West Coast had cultural aversions to Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants.
Immigration Restriction League
An organization founded in Boston by 5 Harvard alumni in 1894. It was dedicated to the belief that immigrants should be screened, through literacy tests and other standards designed to separate the desirable from the undesirable. This group avoided the crude conspiracy theories and the rabid xenophobia (strong dislike and prejudice against immigrants) of the American Protective Association.
Frederick Law Olmsted
Landscape designers who designed New York City's Central Park along with Calvert Vaux. They teamed up to deliberately create a public space that would look as little as the city as possible. Central Park became one of the most popular and most admired public places in the world. As a result, he and Vaux were recruited to design other great parks and public spaces in other cities.
City Beautiful Movement
Movement led by Daniel Burnham, the architect of the neoclassical building the "Great White City". This was aimed to impose a similar order and symmetry on the disordered life of cities around the country. Burnham would tell city planners to "make no little plans", and his influence led to the remaking of cities all across the country.
Tenements
A poorly built, overcrowded apartment located in horrible areas of the city. This type of housing was really the only option for workers and the poor, and so landlords would pack as many people into these buildings as they could. These consisted of many windowless rooms, little or no plumbing, or little or no central heating.
Jacob Riis
A muckraker who used his photography to display the issues of tenements to middle class Americans in his 1890 book "How the Other Half Lives". He did this to show the ignorant, wealthy people the tenements that people were living in so that the wealthy could hopefully do something about it.
Mass Transit
This transportation system, that included cab cars that were towed by continuously moving underground cables, was needed to move the large population around the city. It contributed and allowed for the growth of the suburbs.
Skyscraper
These tall buildings were made possible because of the advent of steel beams and cast iron, which made it easier to build tall buildings. In addition, there were successful experiments for the mechanized elevator. Not long after the Civil War, tall buildings began to appear in major cities.
Political Machines
An organization that set out to gain more votes from immigrants by assisting them when they need it, and then asking for a vote in return. The Boss Rule was made as a result because immigrants were more involved and worried about their own personal services, wealthy individuals were linked to Bosses and made $$ off of them, and there were many structural weaknesses in city government.
Mass Merchandising
The development of affordable products and the creation of new merchandising techniques that made many consumer goods available to a broad market for the first time. An example of this is the emergence of ready-made clothing.
Chain Stores
These smaller stores, owned by a single organization and specialized in one type of product, began to grow and threaten independent store owners. These stores were able to sell manufactured goods at lower prices than the local, independent stores because the chains had so much more volume.
Mail Order Catalogs
A catalog of consumer goods that allowed the rural people to gradually gain access to the new consumer world. These changed the lives of many isolated people, and it introduced them to new trends of fashion and home decor as well as making available tools, machinery, and technologies for the home. This form of advertisement was targeted towards women since they were stuck at home all day.
Department Stores
These larger stores brought different types of products under one roof, made shopping a more glamorous experience, and they were able to sell products more cheaply than their competitors.
Spectator Sports
The search for forms of public leisure hastened the rise of this, especially baseball, which by the end of the century was well on its way to becoming the national pastime. Sports like baseball, football, and basketball gained much popularity when it came to leisure time.
Major Baseball League
By the end of the Civil War, interest in baseball had grown rapidly with more than 200 amateur or semi-professional teams or clubs that existed. Once other cities soon fielded professional teams, they banded together in the National League in 1876. The American League became its rival league, and the first modern World Series was played in 1903. Baseball had become an important business and a great national preoccupation that attracted paying crowds in the thousands.
Coney Island
This island located in Brooklyn, NY became the most famous and popular resort in America. It allowed Americans to escape the noise, smells, heat, and stress of the urban world. It consisted of amusement parks, horse racing, boxing, gambling casinos, saloons, brothels, etc. It gave people who had few opportunities to travel a simulated glimpse of exotic places. For immigrants, this place provided a way of experiencing American mass culture on an equal footing with people of backgrounds different from their own.
Vaudeville
A form of theater adapted from French models that became 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 this, which consisted of a variety of acts. This was also one of the few entertainment media open to black performers.
The Birth of a Nation
When Americans were starting to become attracted to early movies, this movie became the most notable. It was a silent movie that displayed the celebration of the Ku Klux Klan and its demeaning portraits of African Americans. It also contained notoriously racist messages, which was an indication that the audiences for these films were overwhelmingly white.
Land Grant Universities
Colleges and Universities were increasing rapidly in the late nineteenth century, and they benefited particularly from the Morrill Land Grant Act of the Civil War era. In all, 69 of these institutions were established in the last decades of the century, and some included the state university systems of CA, IL, MN, and WI.
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