Notes
Chapter Study Outline
[Introduction: Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire]
An Urban Age and a Consumer Society
Farms and Cities
For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together.
It was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass consumer society.
New York was the largest city.
The Muckrakers
A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life.
Lincoln Steffens
Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills.
Upton Sinclair
Immigration as a Global Process
Between 1901 and 1914, 13 million immigrants came to the United States, many through Ellis Island.
Asian and Mexican immigrants entered the United States in fewer numbers.
Asians entered through Angel Island.
The Immigrant Quest for Freedom
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom.
Some immigrants were "birds of passage," who planned on returning to their homeland.
The new immigrants clustered in close-knit ethnic neighborhoods.
Consumer Freedom
The advent of large department stores in central cities, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents made available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation's factories.
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption.
"Nickelodeon" motion-picture theaters
The Working Woman
Traditional gender roles were changing dramatically as more women were working for wages.
Married women were working more.
The working woman became a symbol of female emancipation.
Battles emerged within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously "free" children, especially daughters.
The Rise of Fordism
Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line.
Ford
[Introduction: Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire]
An Urban Age and a Consumer Society
Farms and Cities
For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together.
It was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass consumer society.
New York was the largest city.
The Muckrakers
A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life.
Lincoln Steffens
Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills.
Upton Sinclair
Immigration as a Global Process
Between 1901 and 1914, 13 million immigrants came to the United States, many through Ellis Island.
Asian and Mexican immigrants entered the United States in fewer numbers.
Asians entered through Angel Island.
The Immigrant Quest for Freedom
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom.
Some immigrants were "birds of passage," who planned on returning to their homeland.
The new immigrants clustered in close-knit ethnic neighborhoods.
Consumer Freedom
The advent of large department stores in central cities, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents made available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation's factories.
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption.
"Nickelodeon" motion-picture theaters
The Working Woman
Traditional gender roles were changing dramatically as more women were working for wages.
Married women were working more.
The working woman became a symbol of female emancipation.
Battles emerged within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously "free" children, especially daughters.
The Rise of Fordism
Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line.
Ford