1. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
How did the growth of cities and the influx of immigrants create a new awareness of ethnic and class differences?
How were racial stereotypes used to reinforce these distinctions?

2. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Growth of American Cities between 1870 – 1900.
See Table Urban Growth: , p. 577
In 1900 New York’s 3.4 million inhabitants almost equaled the nation’s entire 1850 urban population

3. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Urban Growth
Migration from countryside
Nearly 11 million foreign immigrants between 1870 and 1900

4. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Urban Growth = Fertile soil economic growth
Growing cities create new jobs and new markets
Dramatically stimulate national economic expansion

5. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
City’s diversity threatened traditional expectations about community life and social stability
Cities – immigrant groups competed with each other and native-born Americans for jobs, power, and influence
Services were strained
Housing and sanitation problems
Accentuated class differences

6. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Complaints of Native-born American
Noise, stench, and congestion of cityscape
Squalid tenements
Newcomers fondness for drink and strange social customs
When reformers wanted to clean up the environment, they also wanted to destroy distinctive customs

7. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
Growing concentration of Industries produced demands for new workers
Pull Factors – good wages and broad range of jobs (some farm communities vanished from the map)

8. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
Mechanization made farming even more a “mans job”
Women led the exodus from the farm to the city
Mail order catalogs reduced rural needs for women’s labor on subsistence tasks
Young farm women in cities competed with immigrant, black and city born white women

9. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
1860 to 1890 – prospect of a better life also attracted nearly 10 million northern European immigrants to East Coast and Midwestern cities.
Germans – close to 3,000,000
English, Scottish, and Welsh – nearly 2,000,000
Irish – 1,500,000
French-Canadians 800,000
Scandinavian – close to 1,000,000

10. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – more than 81,000 Chinese remained in California and nearby states in 1900.

11. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
“old immigrants” from northern and western Europe
“new immigrants” Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, Armenians from the Middle ease, and in Hawaii, Japanese from Asia

12. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
Immigrants – settled in the city
Irish in New England
Germans in the Midwest
Immigrants forced from homeland for: overpopulation, crop failure, famine, religious persecution, violence, or industrial depression. (push factors)

13. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
Migrants and Immigrants
England – Economic downturn
German – overpopulation and church reorganization
Others came for better opportunities
Hawaii – Japanese Lucrative sugar plantations high wages
Some returned home with money.

14. Everyday Life In Flux: The New American City
1855 – NY State – Castle Garden
Federal Government – Ellis Island
1910 – San Francisco Bay – Angel Island
Immigrant Processing Centers