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Категория: Английский язык
In the United States of 1880s seven out of every ten people lived on farms or in towns with fewer than 2,500 people. By the 1920, a milestone had been reached: a majority of the people — 51.4 per cent — dwelled in cities. Indeed, from Boston to San
Francisco, developed areas sprawled outward, several miles from the original central core. No longer had a walking distance determined a city's size, and no longer had different social groups lived physically close together. Instead, cities were divided into distinct districts: working-class neighborhoods, black ghettos, a ring of suburbs, business districts.
Two forces, mass transportation and economic change, were responsible for this new arrangement. Though steam-power commuter railroads had appeared during the 1850s and 1860s, investors did not begin to mechanize municipal mass transport until the late 1870s. Cable cars were soon replaced by electric-power streetcars, and in Boston, New York and Philadelphia underground passages were dug for cars.
Mass transit lines launched millions of urban dwellers into outlying neighborhoods and created a commuting public. Now those who could afford the fare could live outside the crowded, dirty central city and still return there for work, shopping, and entertainment. Real estate development boomed around the periphery of scores of cities. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, developers of Chicago area opened 800,000 new lots. However, urban sprawl was unplanned. Investors paid little attention to the need for parks, traffic control, and public services.
Public transportation altered commercial as well as residential patterns. As consumers moved outward, business followed. Branches of downtown department stores and banks joined groceries, theatres, drugstores, and specialty shops to create neighborhood shopping centers, the forerunners of the today's shopping malls. Meanwhile, the urban core became the work zone.
Cities also became the main arena for industrial growth. As centers of resources, labor, transportation and communications cities provided everything factories needed. The further industrialization advanced, the more opportunities it created for work and investment in cities. Increased opportunities drew more people to cities. As a result, migration and immigration made the greatest contribution to urban population growth. Each year millions of people were on the move, many of them lured by the cities' promise of opportunity. After 1880s a second wave of mass immigration began from Canada, Mexico, and Japan. All immigrants brought with them memories of their homelands and adjusted to American life in light of those memories. Many immigrant neighborhoods were made up of enclaves of Italians from the same province, Japanese from the same island district. In these transplanted communities people practiced their religions as they always had, held traditional feasts, married within their group, and pursued old feuds with people from rival villages and provinces.
In the 1880s, another group of migrants began to move into American cities. Thousands of rural blacks moved northward and westward, fleeing violence and political oppression and seeking better employment. Although numbers of black urban dwellers would grow much larger after 1915, thirty-two cities contained 10,000 or more blacks by 1900, and 79 per cent all of blacks outside the South lived in cities. Because few factories would employ blacks, most black workers found jobs in the serving sector — cleaning, cooking, carting. Together the three major migrant groups that peopled American cities — native whites, foreigners, and native blacks- sowed the seeds of modern American culture, to which each group made important contributions.
Along with the growth of cities the national economy was created. One of the prime factors that gathered up and pushed the development of national economy of the United States was the railroads which snaked across the country linking it from coast to coast. In fact, the railroad made possible a hitherto unimaginable speed and volume of commerce. For example, wagons manufactured in Indianapolis, Indiana, were carried in days to Spokane, Washington, where wheat was shipped back across the continent to New York City.
In connection with these great changes industrial cities required new modes of work, which later turned out to be the private business corporations which became the hallmark of the 1870—1920 urban era. Urban and industrial growth transformed the national economy and freed the United States from dependence on European capital and manufactured goods. Imports and foreign investments still flowed into the country. But by the early 1990s, cities and their factories, stores, and banks were converting the United States from a debtor agricultural nation into a major industrial, financial, and exporting power.
