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Essay On American Cities In The 1800s

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THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIST
In the 1800s, new cities around the Great Lakes and West Coast began to form. Americans quickly migrated. These new cities represented both the best and the worst of American life. Not once before in American history had such a great number lived so close to one another. With ease these people could share ideas like never before. Although these newfound homes produced many products, they were also a major market. Now, in one small area, citizens could enjoy better and cheaper products. Technology and skyscrapers, such as the Woolworth Building, created possibilities while trolleys and cars decreased commuting time. Beneath the skylines lay abject poverty. Immigrant neighborhoods struggled to realize what the American …show more content…
SOCIETY
Society in the Gilded Age was a time of civil rights, poverty, political strain, modernization, urbanism and agriculture. New technology such as the telephone, the light bulb, the trolley, repeating rifles and especially the railroad became new to Americans. Americans saw the United States shift from an agricultural to an urban, industrial society, as millions of Americans flocked to cities in the post Civil War era. Nearly half of the population lived in urban areas by 1900, in comparison to twenty percent in 1860. Many young people left the countryside in search of new wonders and forms of work.
Included in this major shift from rural to urban areas, a new wave of immigration increased America’s population significantly. Immigrants came from post-war regions of southern and eastern Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, Croatia, and Czechoslovakia. This new group was poorer and less educated than the Irish and German immigrants who had made the journey to the United States earlier in the century.
THE GILDED AGE 1870-1900
“Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its

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