AMERICAN URBANIZATION & NEW YORK CITY

Aliaksandrava Maryia

Early English/British periodEpisode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

The English had renamed the colony the Province of New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the mayors of New York. The city grew northward, and remained the largest and most important city in the Province of New York.

New York was cosmopolitan from the beginning, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. There were numerous ethnic groups but they generally stuck together and rarely intermarried. Freedom of worship was part of the city's foundation, and the trial for libel in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New-York Weekly Journal established the principle of freedom of the press in the British colonies. Sephardic Jews expelled from Dutch Brazil were welcome in New York.

Early English/British periodEpisode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 raised accusations of arson and conspiracy. Many slaves were executed on unclear charges.

The Irish celebrated St. Patrick's Day at the Crown and Thistle Tavern as early as 1756. This holiday has since become a yearly city-wide celebration that is famous around the world as the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Great Fire of New York (1776)Episode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

The Great Fire of New York was a devastating fire that burned through the night of September 21, 1776 on the west side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan. It broke out in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the American Revolutionary War.

The fire destroyed 10 to 25 percent of the city, and some unburned parts of the city were plundered. Many people believed or assumed that one or more people deliberately started the fire, for a variety of different reasons. British leaders accused rebels acting within the city, and many residents assumed that one side or the other had started it. The fire had long-term effects on the British occupation of the city, which did not end until the British left the city in 1783.

Great Fire of New York (1776)Episode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

American Revolutionary WarEpisode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

General Washington correctly surmised that after their defeat at the Siege of Boston the British strategy would be to divide the colonies by capturing the strategic port and waterways of New York City. He then began to fortify the city and took personal command of the Continental Army at New York in the summer of 1776. Five battles comprising the New York Campaign were fought around the city's then limits in late 1776, beginning with the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn on August 27 -- the largest battle of the entire war. A quarter of the city structures were destroyed in the Great Fire on September 21, a few days after the British Landing at Kip's Bay and the Battle of Harlem Heights. Following the highly suspicious fire, British authorities apprehended dozens of people for questioning, including Nathan Hale, who was executed a day later for espionage. The British conquest of Manhattan was completed with the fall of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, and thereafter they held the city without challenge until 1783. Major General James Robertson, commandant in charge of the city confiscated houses of rebels who had left and distributed them to British officers.

American Revolutionary WarEpisode One: The Country and the City, 1609-1825

New York HeraldEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

The New York Herald was a large distribution newspaper based in New York City that existed between May 6, 1835 and 1924.

The first issue of the paper was published by James Gordon Bennett, Sr. on May 6, 1835. By 1845 it was the most popular and profitable daily newspaper in the United States. In 1861, it circulated 84,000 copies and called itself "the most largely circulated journal in the world." He stated that the function of a newspaper "is not to instruct but to startle."Bennett's politics tended to be anti-Catholic and he had tended to favor the Know-Nothing faction though he was not particularly anti-immigrant as they were. During the American Civil War, it was a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party.

New York HeraldEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

New York TribuneEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States. In 1924 it was merged with the New York Herald to form the New York Herald Tribune, which ceased publication in 1966.

The Tribune was created by Greeley with the hopes of providing a straightforward, trustworthy media source in an era when newspapers such as the New York Sun and New York Herald thrived on sensationalism. Although considered the least partisan of the leading newspapers, the Tribune did reflect some of Horace Greeley's idealist views. His journal retained Karl Marx as European correspondent in 1851; although Marx viewed the Tribune as a 'filthy rag' [1], the arrangement, whereby his collaborator Engels also submitted articles under the by-line, lasted ten years, the final Marx column being published in Feb 1861.

New York TribuneEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

Barnum's American MuseumEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

Barnum's American Museum was located at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York City, USA, from 1841 to 1865. The museum was owned by famous showman P.T. Barnum and his partner and original owner, John Scudder. Prior to their partnership, the museum was known as Scudder's American Museum. The museum offered both strange, and educational attractions. The museum is also referenced in the broadway musical Barnum. The museum was relaunched on the Internet in July 2000

Barnum's American MuseumEpisode Two: Order and Disorder, 1825-1865

Article by Mike Clough, "A Merger That Puts New York on Top"

New York had two advantages: the location of its port and its growing capital markets.

But the key to the city's success was its leaders' ability to envision the future path of the national economy and develop strategies to use New York's advantages to ensure it was in a position to dominate that economy. The two most important examples of this were the city's decision to build the Erie Canal, which positioned New York to control the exports of the U.S. hinterland to Europe; and its "triangle trade," which allowed New York's commercial interests to control the cotton trade between the South and England.

One of New York's most remarkable qualities has been its ability to capture economic gains from commercial developments that began in other regions. For example, steel (Pittsburgh), automobiles (Detroit), motion pictures (Los Angeles) and oil (Houston) all created bases for potential regional challenges to the Big Apple. But in all four cases, New York ended up co-opting or controlling its rivals. One indicator of this achievement is that all three of New York's great philanthropic foundations--the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corp.--were created with money from fortunes made outside New York.

The Great Transatlantic MigrationsPATTERNS OF TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATION

WALTER NUGENT

America — all of which helped extend long-standing European migration patterns to transatlantic distances. Migration had taken place before 1870 within Europe and from Europe to other parts of the world but, thanks to railroads and steamships, the scale of the post-1870 period expanded into something altogether larger. Migration continued after 1914, but it became much reduced because of World War I, the restrictive laws passed by-several countries in the 1920s, and the economic depression of the 1930s. Between 1870 and 1914, tens of millions of Europeans and others crossed and recrossed international borders and sailed the North and South Atlantic, often many times.

The Great Transatlantic MigrationsPATTERNS OF TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATION

WALTER NUGENT

Repatriation — returning home after a season, a year, or a few years — was also a long-established pattern for many Europeans. The size of return flows is unclear be-cause of poor or missing statistics, but it was large. Argentina's official statistics for 1857-1914 indicate that the number leaving was 43.3 percent of the number arriving. For Brazil between 1899 and 1912, the proportion may have been about 66 percent. For the United States (where departure figures were kept only after 1908) from 1908 through 1914, the proportion was 52.5 percent.

The Great Transatlantic MigrationsIMMIGRATION TO THE U.S. IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

WALTER NUGENT

Second, migration to the United States came from more places than did migration to Argentina, Brazil, or Canada. Except for the Spanish and Portuguese, very few of whom ventured north of the Caribbean, every group migrating from Europe arrived in some numbers in the United States. Before the creation of the railroad and steamship networks, migrants to the United States came chiefly from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia. Russian-Germans, Czechs, Swiss, and a few other Central Europeans began arriving in the 1870s, most of them in that industrially depressed decade in search of western land.

In 1900, 72 percent of German-stock employed males worked outside agriculture, as did about 84 percent of the Irish-stock

The Great Transatlantic MigrationsIMMIGRATION TO THE U.S. IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

WALTER NUGENT

In any event, Europeans kept to the North and the West. They also kept southern black people from migrating north. As Brinley Thomas has pointed out, blacks did not migrate from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest until European mass mi-gration stopped because of Work! War I, and more definitively by the restriction laws of 1921 and 1924. Only then did the historic "great exodus" of blacks begin. The Northeast, Midwest, and West, in the meantime, attracted European migrants, shutting out the South almost entirely.