The Emergency of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760-1820

Abstract

CITIES, as Americans commonly think of them, are associated with massive concentrations of people, cement pavements, skyscrapers. Within recent decades great metropolitan centers have absorbed the majority of the population. Cities have become the focus of American social and economic life. Notwithstanding its vast territory and superabundant agriculture, the United States has become preeminently an urban nation. Urban historians have directed primary attention to cities during the industrial era, when the physical character of today's city developed. The preindustrial origins of American urban development and the transition from rural to urban society have so far received little attention. When one seeks out urban studies in the preindustrial era, the works of Carl Bridenbaugh, which chronicle the emergence of five seaboard cities, and Richard Wade, who describes the rise of five inland cities, stand almost alone.' Moreover their methodology, essentially that of the urban biographer, has dominated the literature since Bridenbaugh's first major work appeared in 1938. Only in the last several years have alternative lines of analysis been explored, and the most important of these has come not from a historian but from a geographer, James T. Lemon.2 Working on eastern Pennsyl-