American urban history

American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s, and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analysis of what cities have in common, and started using theoretical models and scholarly biographies of specific cities. The United States has also had a long history of hostility to the city, as characterized for example by Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism. Mary Sies (2003) argues:

American urban history is a branch of the history of the United States and of the broader field of Urban history. That field of history examines the historical development of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography business history, and even 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.

In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many 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). Schlesinger and his students took a group approach to history, sharply downplaying the role of individuals. Handlin added a focus on groups defined by ethnicity (that is Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians Hispanics etc.) or by class (working class or middle class). The Harvard model was that the urban environment, including the interaction with other groups, shaped their history and group outlook.

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