Week of February 1

As Schlereth will demonstrate, all sorts of mobility dominated American culture at the turn of the century. It may help to organize thinking about this as a matter of scale of distance, as much as anything else. At the top of the scale would be immigration. At the bottom, the commute from domicile to workplace. In between would be the movement between regions of this country, and from the farms, villages and market towns to the emerging industrial centers. All of these happened more or less simultaneously and more or less continuously, and at an ever accelerating pace.

Today, we’ll look at the bottom of the distance scale, looking at the trolley and the trolley commute. By 1936, Trolleys were considered figures of fun, but in the Gilded Age they were the latest thing in moving people about. The Library of Congress American Memory collection of Thomas Edison's early films has examples of films which demonstrate public fascination with these modern inventions. Here is one of them.

Looking Ahead.

We’ll flip to the top of the distance scale next week as we explore immigration and immigrants.

To do this, we’re going to do some work with historic census figures. I’ll give a demonstration in class today, but you might try playing with the materials yourself. You’ll find them at http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/ You might also want to check historical census data from the Census Bureau itself. http://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html

During the Gilded Age the population of immigrants grew in absolute numbers, proportional numbers, and diversity. As we will see, in certain American cities the number of persons born abroad reached and may have exceeded 50 per cent. This was, of course, no accident. Agents of immigration agencies “sold” the United States to Europeans–but not only to Europeans: to Asians, and South Americans as well. The Handook, which you can read online or download to your computer in several different formats, will give you a sense of how the promise of the new world was extended, and what elements served to attract the new wave of Americans. You are not going to want to read all of this, word for word. Section One, General Directions, I'd suggest reading throughout. Section two I'd probably read from "Naturalization" p. 37 through the section on Industry p. 52. For section three, read about the section of the country in which your "alter ego" might live. Note how many fewer states there were in 1871. The rest of the book you can safely skip, though you might find it interesting should you have time to curl up with it over the weekend.

Immigrants didn’t spread themselves equally across the United States. We’re going to play with two tools to give us a little flavor of who came, from where, and to where. One of these tools is the Panoramic Maps collection which is part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. I’ve introduced these in other classes, a bit. If you’ve not played with them before, you have a treat coming. The cities we’ll be investigating with them include

I’ve chosen these particular cities not only because they have number of panoramic maps, but because they were magnets for immigrants, as well. Note that there may be several of these maps some of thse cities.

The second tool is a little more tricky. We won’t really talk about it on Monday, but I want you to do some fiddling with it between now and Tuesday just to see if you can get it working for you. I’m referring to the Historic Census Map Server, provided to us courtesy of the University of Virginia. Through it, you’ll be able to trace the growth of immigrant populations from 1870 to 1900 or 1910...both generally (in terms of persons “foreign born” and specifically (“persons born in Bohemia, for example) and you’ll be able to plot them in both numbers and as percentages of the total population.

I’d like to have each of you choose one of the cities above (I may add a couple of others). Homestead is actually there because of the famous (or infamous) Homestead Strike. The combined research of everyone will give us a mosaic of the development of cities and immigrant communities in the United States