Nineteenth-century cities: essays in the new urban history

This book, based on a conference at Yale University, explores ways of understanding the first industrial cities to cities of today. The essays in the book define what has come to be known as the “new urban history.” The cities studied range from small communities – such as Springfield, Massachusetts – to giants like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. While the majority of the contributors deal with American cities, four essays examine cities in Canada, England, France, and Colombia. The essays explore such areas as urban patterns of class stratification, changing rates of occupational and residential mobility, social origins of particular elite groups, the relations between political control and social class, differences in opportunities for various ethnic groups, and the relationships between family structure and city life. In all these fields, the authors relate sociological theory to the historical materials.