Bender, Thomas, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

This book examines intellectual and institutional responses to unprecedented urban and industrial growth in nineteenth-century America. In the rapid urban and industrial growth of this period, ideas inherited from Jefferson's generation no longer enabled men and women to make sense of their increasingly urban experiences. New ideologies were therefore sought to supply the meaning that older patterns of belief no longer produced. Professor Bender argues that the cultural crisis produced by urban industrialism was felt by a wide spectrum of Americans - ranging from sophisticated thinkers and middle-class gentlemen to reformers and the "mill girls" of Lowell, Massachusetts. By the mid-nineteenth century a new urban vision had developed out of the interplay of a New England version of early American agrarian ideals and the modernizing forces associated with the industrial city. It sought to bring city and country, and the values they respectively stand for, into a contrapuntal relationship.