Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The historiographical approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.Michael Frisch, "American urban history as an example of recent historiography." History and Theory (1979): 350–377. in JSTOR
Scholars studying the history of urbanization focus on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city.Derek Keene, "Ideas of the metropolis," Historical Research (2011) 84#225 pp 379–398. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888–1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011).Bruce M. Stave, ed., The Making of Urban History: Historiography through Oral History (1977) in Google The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history.Raymond A. Mohl, "The History of the American City," in William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson Jr. eds., Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (1973) pp 165–205 quote p 165
Comparative studies Only a handful of studies attempt a global history of cities, notably Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961).See also Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present (1988) Representative comparative studies include Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (1993); Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (1995), and James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru. eds. Edo and Paris (1994) (Edo was the old name for Tokyo).They are reviewed in Wolfgang Reinhard, "New Contributions to Comparative Urban History," Journal of Early Modern History (1997) 1#2 pp 176-181.
Architectural history is its own field but occasionally overlaps with urban history.See Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (1991)
The political role of cities in helping state formation—and in staying independent—is the theme of Charles Tilly and W. P. Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (1994). Comparative elite studies—who was in power—are typified by Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Laliotou, eds. Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940 (2008) .See also Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (1982) Labor activists and socialists often had national or international networks that circulated ideas and tactics.Shelton Stromquist, "'Thinking globally; acting locally': Municipal Labour and Socialist Activism in Comparative Perspective, 1890–1920," Labour History Review (2009) 74#3 pp 233-256
Great Britain
In the 1960s, the historiography of Victorian towns and cities began to flourish in Britain.Gary W. Davies, "The rise of urban history in Britain c. 1960-1978" (PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2014) online, wWillith detailed bibliography pp 205-40 Much attention focused first on the Victorian city, with topics ranging from demography, public health, the working-class, and local culture.H. J. Dyos, and Michael Wolff, eds. Victorian City: Images and Realities (2 vol. 1973). In recent decades, topics regarding class, capitalism, and social structure gave way to studies of the cultural history of urban life, as well as the study of groups such as women, prostitutes, migrants from rural areas, and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire.Kevin Myers and Ian Grosvenor, "Birmingham Stories: Local Histories of Migration and Settlement and the Practice of History." Midland History (2011) 36#2 pp 149-162 The urban environment itself became a major topic, as studies of the material fabric of the city, and the structure of urban space, became more prominent.Simon Gunn, "Urbanization" in Chris Williams, ed., Eight Companion to 19th-Century Britain (2007) pp 238-252
Historians have almost always focused on London, but they have also studied smaller towns and cities from the medieval period, as well as the urbanization that attended the industrial revolution. In the second half of the 19th century, provincial centres such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester doubled in size and became regional capitals. They were all conurbations that included smaller cities and suburbs in their catchment area. Available scholarly materials have become quite comprehensive today.D. M. Palliser, Peter Clark, and Martin Daunton, eds. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (3 vol 2000), which reaches down to 1950.
United States
Urban biography Urban biography is the narrative history of a city and often reaches a general audience. Urban biographies cover the interrelationships among various dimensions, such as politics, demography, business, high culture, popular culture, housing, neighbourhoods, and ethnic groups. It covers municipal government as well as physical expansion, growth and decline. Historians often focus on the largest and most dominant city—usually the national capital—which geographers call a "primate city."
Some representative urban biographies are: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898 (2000) S. G. Checkland, The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875–1975 (1981) Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam, The Life of a City (1972) Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo; 1001 Years of City Victorious (1971) Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (1994) Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (1962) Christopher Hibbert, London, the Biography of a City (1969) Robert Hughes, Barcelona (1992) Colin Jones. Paris: Biography of a City (2004) Blake McKelvey. Rochester (4 vol, 1961), Rochester NY Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (2012) Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago (3 vol 1957), to 1893. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1998) Alexandra Ritchie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (1998) James Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb (1974) Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (1997), considers literature, music, theater, painting, and decorative arts.
Historians have developed typologies of cities, emphasizing their geographic location and economic specialization. In the United States Carl Bridenbaugh was a pioneer in historiography. He emphasized the major port cities on the East Coast, the largest of which were Boston and Philadelphia, each with fewer than 40,000 people at the time of the American Revolution.Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (1938), and Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (1955) Other historians have covered the port cities up and down the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast, along with the river ports along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Industrialization began in New England, and several small cities have scholarly histories. The railroad cities of the West, stretching from Chicago to Kansas City to Wichita to Denver have been well treated. Blake McKelvey provides an encyclopedic overview of the functions of major cities in The Urbanization of America, 1860–1915 (1963), and The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915–1966 (1968)
Large-scale reference books Peter Clark of the Urban History Center of the University of Leicester was the general editor (and Cambridge University Press the publisher) of a massive history of British cities and towns, running 2800 pages in 75 chapters by 90 scholars. The chapters deal not with biographies of individual cities, but with economic, social or political themes that cities had in common.D. M. Palliser, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. I, 600-1540 (2000); P. A. Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain vol. II, 1540-1840; M. J. Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III, 1840 1950.See review by: Albert J. Schmidt, Journal of Social History (2003) 36#3 pp. 781-784 in JSTOR Two highly influential, authoritative and comprehensive compendia of European urban history were also compiled by Barry Haynes of the Centre for Urban History at Leicester University in 1990 and 1991, published by Leicester University. These books made a significant contribution to the bibliographic review of urban history research and literature in both Eastern and Western Europe.
In the United States a very different approach was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities has sponsored large historical encyclopedias for many states and several cities, most notably the Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004; also online edition) and The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995, 2nd ed. 2010) They followed the model of an earlier encyclopedia of ClevelandDavid D. Van Tassel and John J. Brabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (1987) and relished the details about neighbourhoods, people, organizations and events, without imposing any overall theme.
Suburbs
A new subgenre is the history of specific suburbs. Historians have concentrated on specific places, typically focusing on the origins of the suburb in relation to the central city, the pattern of growth, different functions (such as residential or industrial), local politics, as well as racial exclusion and gender roles.Ruth McManus and Philip J. Ethington, "Suburbs in transition: new approaches to suburban history," Urban History (2007) 34#2 pp 317-337 The main overview is Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1987).
Many people have assumed that early-20th-century suburbs were enclaves for middle-class whites, a concept that carries tremendous cultural influence yet is actually stereotypical. Many suburbs are based on a heterogeneous society of working-class and minority residents, many of whom share the American Dream of upward social status via home ownership. Sies (2001) argues that it is necessary to examine how "suburb" is defined as well as the distinction made between cities and suburbs, geography, economic circumstances, and the interaction of numerous factors that move research beyond acceptance of stereotyping and its influence on scholarly assumptions.Mary Corbin Sies, "North American Suburbs, 1880-1950," Journal of Urban History, March 2001, Vol. 27 Issue 3, pp 313-46
New urban history The "new urban history" emerged in the 1960s as a branch of Social history seeking to understand the "city as process" and, through quantitative methods, to learn more about the inarticulate masses in the cities, as opposed to the mayors and elites. Much of the attention is devoted to individual behaviour, and how the intermingling of classes and ethnic groups operated inside a particular city. Smaller cities are much easier to handle when it comes to tracking a sample of individuals over ten or 20 years.