The Classical Revival and Urban-Rural Conflict in Nineteenth Century North America

One of the more perplexing problems we face in the historical geography of the nineteenth century in North America is the origin of the anti-urban sentiment that stood alongside other "fears" as the material of political warfare. When "twisting the Lion's tail," jeering native gentility, and decrying the "infection" of foreign culture failed to produce a rush to join a politician's legion, it was always possible to trot out the specter of the bloated, parasitic city feeding on the vital sap of America. Yet Carl Bridenbaugh showed us thirty-five years ago that the seeds of American urbanism were not "solely the product of nineteenth century industrialism, but rather . . . germinated with the earliest settlement on American soil." He concluded "Surviving evidence justifies the temerity of my conclusion that a full-fledged urban society existed well before the close of our first century of history." (Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness. Second Edition. New York, 1960, vii.) Any nativist argumentation would seem to require the inclusion of the city in our revered past, yet in the last century there was a strong belief that urban settlement was a late and non-vital growth on an older and more "basic" agricultural root-system

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• Interpreting the Modern City

  William R Code, William Code•Urban Geography•2000

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