AP® U.S. History—Semester B

Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 8.04: Bright Lights, Big City

Ah, the aroma.
(Source)

Everyone who argues that "Everything is bigger in Texas" has never spent much time in New York City.

In 1860, only one in six Americans lived in a town with a population above 8,000 people (which, today, is the size of California City, a town so deserted it was chronicled on Atlas Obscura). By 1900, only one in three did so. For every city dweller who moved to a farm between 1860 and 1900, 20 town folks migrated to the cities.

The boom in city living was primarily due to new economic opportunities—particularly for a more diverse swath of workers. An increase in unskilled labor and the need for more workers in the multiplying factories opened the door for international and internal migrants and women.

Immigration peaked during this period, as we've seen, with roughly 20 million immigrants reaching American shores between 1890 and 1924. The Great Migration of Black Americans also changed the dynamics of the cities, as Southerners moved North to escape harsh economic circumstances and Jim Crow. Women were entering the workplace in larger numbers, taking advantage of a new rash of clerical, secretarial, and unskilled factory jobs. And then, of course, there was child labor. Sigh.

Of course, all these new city-dwellers needed somewhere to live. Finding space for these people, particularly in land-strapped cities like New York, was a constant challenge. Ultimately, many found themselves shoved into overcrowded tenements in ethnic neighborhoods, far enough from the mansions to make the wealthy feel "safe," and close enough to one another to make the nativists feel threatened.

Despite the incredibly poor standards of living in these areas, the concentration of all these American and immigrant migrants also made for remarkably diverse cities, rich in culture, language, and lifestyle. Also diverse was the standard of living: while many immigrants lived in ramshackle and overcrowded tenement buildings, the wealthy built enormous mansions, gilded with jewels and imported marble.

As Lalume, the heroine of the American musical Kismet, sang:

Not since Nineveh, not since Sidon,
Not since Jericho started slidin'
From the din of a horn that's never blown here!
Our palaces are gaudier,
Our alley ways are bawdier,
Our princes more autocratic here,
Our beggars more distinctly aromatic here
(Source)

Give our regards to Broadway, immigrants. and laborers.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 8.8.04a: Not Since Nineveh

It all comes back to railroads.

Urbanization was due, in no small part, to the increased access to transportation across the United States. Factories and mills were built around railroad hubs, creating de-facto cities across the nation. The ease of transportation meant that cities once considered distant neighbors, like Boston and New York, now became part of the same commercial community.

Industrial cities grew based on the goods and labor they already had: Minneapolis, already a wheat-growing state, could now mass-produce flour, while experienced brass mechanics in Bridgeport, Connecticut easily adapted their work to new technology.

Cities themselves offered industrial projects: steel suspension and rails were used to build badly-needed bridges, and laborers found many jobs in constructing public and private housing, roads, and streetlights. New construction technology was transforming the kinds of structures that were being built, too.

Modernist architecture followed simple, rudimentary principles: that "beauty" was secondary to form, that form is determined by function and materials, and that a building should not disguise its purpose (in other words, a painting should be obviously a painting, and a factory should be obviously a factory).

Take a look at the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building in Chicago, Illinois, built between 1899 and 1903. The architect of the building, Louis Sullivan, coined the phrase "form follows function," (Source) and he demonstrates it with aplomb here. For example, the steel framing is practical and modern, and Sullivan framed the lower store windows with detail in order to draw the eye of a potential customer:

(Source)

Because of easy access to railways and trolleys, suburban enclaves began to crop up around the tracks, allowing middle class laborers to commute. New Jersey thanks you, Gilded Age.

Of course, the boom in industry also meant a boom in industrial employment. For the first time in American history, the workplace moved from the family homestead to a business-owned factory. Where family groups had worked together to farm or create materials and goods, now laborers were thrust into enormous, diverse factories, all working to build something they'd likely never actually get to see in full.

Considering the history of labor as a family affair, it shouldn't be too surprising that everyone in the family quickly became part of the industrial machine—including children. In many factories, unskilled labor was dearly needed, and often, children fit the bill. Hey, you don't need a university degree to unspool some thread, they argued, so get over here and unspool, kid.

The problem of immense poverty didn't do much to help. As the gap between the rich and the poor grew, the poor needed to work even harder to simple stay afloat. Sending children to the factories was one way to increase a family's income, particularly for immigrants, who often lacked access to schools for their children.

Unfortunately, though they didn't require skilled workers, many of these factory jobs were incredibly hazardous. Like their adult counterparts, children worked long hours with little training on how to operate the high-powered machinery. Many lost limbs and fingers (eep). Some worked in factories filled with noxious fumes, which they inhaled for hours each day.

The most famous of these were the Radium Girls, who painted watch faces with luminescent paint. Thanks to the fumes from the paint, these young women literally glowed—until, of course, they died from radium poisoning.

While some states passed child labor laws intended to encourage school attendance and ensure safety for child workers, most were left unenforced. The need for cheap labor, money for poor families, and a lack of access to other activities for children meant that child labor would continue through the early 20th century.

Temperamental Tenements

Alongside the overcrowded factories and industrial buildings (or, really, far enough away to pretend those places didn't exist) were a host of remarkably luxurious mansions, which lined Fifth Avenue.

While most of these have since been demolished and replaced with Bergdorf Goodman's (see: the Vanderbilt Mansion), and some have been transformed into cool museums that are free on Sundays (see: the Frick Museum), a handful still remain intact (see: the $50 million Beekman mansion). During the Gilded Age, the lined Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park on East 4th St., then considered the center of town, up to East 85th Street.

These mansions were diverse in design, ranging from Gothic Revival to French Renaissance to Beaux Arts. Their primary purpose was to impress those who drove up and down the Avenue in their carriages, as well as those who managed to gain an invitation to call.

Ultimately, despite the fact that most of these mansions have been demolished, the Upper East Side retains its tony reputation: primarily because there is still very little public transportation around there. If you want to leave the Upper East Side, dahling, you better have a driver.

New York City in the 1870s was the perfect microcosm of the modern American Gilded Age city. Like other industrial cities, most of its business was conducted along its two waterways, the Hudson River and the East River. Manhattan, only about seven miles long and three wide, seemed ideal for industrial expansion, along with Brooklyn to the East. What everyone seemed to forget was that Manhattan was an island, and factories need laborers. Where on earth were they supposed to live?

Public transportation was inadequate and inconvenient. 12 different companies controlled the streetcars, which ran at the achingly slow speed of four to six miles an hour. Most never stopped in neighborhoods where the poor resided. Only the middle and upper classes could afford to move to the suburbs and commute into the city. Multi-occupant dwellings, like apartment buildings and multi-family homes, hadn't yet become common, since most people had previously lived in modest homes.

The new American city needed a new American kind of housing.

In December 1878, Henry C. Meyer, a leading sanitation engineer, offered up a cash prize of $500 to whoever could design the best tenement building (technically defined as a multi-occupancy building of any kind, though "tenements" came to mean "slums" for reasons we'll soon understand). The winner was James Ware, who came up with the "dumbbell" tenement design.

Meet Ware's tenement:

(Source: Shmoop)

The "dumbbell" part of the tenement is clear in the visual: large rooms on the far ends narrowed in the middle to create a shape like a dumbbell weight. This allowed these tenements to be stacked right up against one another, with a small air shaft created in the space between each tenement's bedrooms and hallway:

(Source: Shmoop)

Due to New York City zoning laws, each tenement "unit"—which housed at least four families apiece—was only 25 feet wide and 100 feet long. There was very little direct sunlight (only in the parlor and via the air shafts), and there was no running water, which meant privies were constructed in spare space outside the buildings.

By 1910, New York City's Lower East Side, where most immigrants lived, housed around 375, 048 people per square mile. (Source) Per. Square. Mile. Today, Manila has the world's highest population density at 107, 562 per square mile. That's over one third less than the Lower East Side in 1910.

It was legitimately bleak.

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 8.8.04b: Listen to that Ragtime

Most immigrants found some comfort in the chaos by settling in communities that were populated by their own ethnic groups.

• New York City's Lower East Side was had pockets of Jewish, Irish, Italian, and countless other immigrant groups all smushed together in tenements.
• Italians settled New York's Little Italy on Mulberry Street, North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco, and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.
• Chinatowns also sprung up in those cities (plus a Japanese Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, when Japanese immigration picked up in the 1890s).

Some things never change: even today, ethnic neighborhoods have cropped up in American cities of all sizes. A few examples: Corona, Queens in New York City is 2017's central hub for Ecuadorean migrants, Frogtown in St. Paul, Minnesota is home base for Hmong migrants, and North Boise, Idaho is rich with Somali refugees.

A number of factors encourage this kind of ethnic clustering. America was a whole new world for most immigrants, and often a pretty hostile one. Living in ethnically similar communities provided comfort and support, not to mentioned a shared language and culture.

Plus, families liked to stay together. That's generally how families work. As more and more immigrated, the communities grew. At the same time that they enjoyed the comfort of familiarity and family groupings, they also faced systemic discrimination in housing.

If there's one benefit to being smushed up alongside a lot of other people, it's that those conditions are ripe for cultural development. Hmm. Maybe today's artists are missing something: maybe they should all crowd together in tenements and see what happens.

Just kidding. Don't do that. Really. It's awful.

Along with their shared language and customs, immigrants brought their traditional culture with them to the United States. Food was one way this culture was expressed: German street vendors peddled pretzels (now a New York City sidewalk staple), for example, Chinese salesmen hawked rock candy, and Italian deli owners created thick, meaty sandwiches. Numerous ethnic grocers, catering to the tastes of the homeland, brought a diverse bevy of goods to American shores.

One of the most massive cultural contribution we can attribute to immigrants, though, was birth of the Broadway musical. Yes, Dear Evan Fan-sens and Hamiltrash, you have the immigrants to thank for your favorite car-belting ballads.

The arts were already booming in the years after the Civil War, as we've seen with the touring Wild West and burlesque shows. These provided primarily working-class audiences spectacular entertainment that made work a little less ho-hum.

Minstrel shows, where performers parodied ethnic stereotypes, often in blackface, were already very popular. Racist as these shows were (and hoo boy, were they), they did bring new musical stylings—namely ragtime and jazz, which were heavily influenced by African rhythms—to a broader public. Tin Pan Alley, the name given to a group of composers and music publishers in New York City who are credited with making modern jazz music mainstream, were primarily composed of Jewish immigrants.

Vaudeville shows, which were comprised of a mix of acts (comedy, burlesque, minstrel shows, music, clowning, etc.) quickly adjusted to the influx of migrants. These shows catered to people with unique skills and talents, and immigrants brought something fresh and fun to the table. From Chinese contortionists to Yiddish theatre to British music hall jamming, vaudeville was becoming as diverse as the cities where it played.

Perhaps the most famous immigrant performer was Al Jolson, who was the highest-paid performer in the country through most of the 1920s. Jolson, born Asa Yoelson in Russia, emigrated as a young man with dreams of a bright, shiny future in America. It seems like the big story here is "Immigrant Man Makes Good by Forsaking His Cultural Identity," but the truth is much more complex than that.

While Jolson did leave his family and change his name, he became famous not in spite of his Jewish heritage, but because of it. Jolson brought a unique Yiddish theatre-playful temperament to his performances, and he infused his voice with deeply-felt emotion. Jolson didn't abandon his past, or assimilate into the future: he made something brand new. The musical.

Jolson alone, of course, did not "birth" the American musical; it took a whole host of ingredients. Some of them we've talked about already:

• Yiddish theatre performances (Jewish immigrants)
• Minstrel show traditions (black American migrants)
• The musical stylings of operetta (French immigrants)
• Edwardian music hall (British immigrants)
• The composers of Tin Pan Alley (Jewish immigrants)
• And a whole lot more.

What can we say, except you're welcome?

Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 8.04a: The Power of a Picture

The power of a picture (or a moving picture, in this case) can't be underestimated.

The birth of the photograph in the late 19th century opened the door to a whole lot of powerful pictures. Social reformers—who we'll continue to discuss later in the unit—often used photographic evidence to demonstrate to the public things about American society that they thought should change.

For example, Jacob Riis' powerful images of tenement families helped bring advancements to apartment technology, and Lewis Hine's images of child labor helped encourage the passage of reform laws.

While we'll discuss more specific efforts for reform later in the unit, we're going to take a moment now to explore the way "social justice" photography told viewers stories about modern American life during the Gilded Age. Lewis Hine, who was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to investigate labor abuses, exposed the horrors of child labor through his own unique lens.

Here's the thing, though: photographers are people too, and they're the ones telling the story. Like the filmmakers of Paradise Lost, Hine had a perspective on what he was seeing, and also faced limitations of access. Filming in a courtroom is not usually permitted; nor was photographing in a factory. Like modern documentarians, Lewis Hine was a character in the story he was telling. In this activity, we'll explore exactly how that changed the story itself.

Let's analyze some photographs, why don't we? As you look at each image, try and remain objective in your observations. Focus on what you can see rather than what you can feel (at least until we tell you differently).

Answer the following questions in two to three sentences each, unless otherwise specified.

Sample Lesson - Activity