ADVANCED PLACEMENT UNITED STATES HISTORY
Homework Assignment
Urbanization

 

Directions:  Read Chapter Nineteen of your textbook, and answer the following questions in complete sentences.  Your responses must be either typewritten or hand-written in black or blue ink.

 

 

PART ONE:

 

  1. What are some of the factors that enabled factories to locate in urban areas?

 

  1. Why did an American city such as Chicago differ so greatly from a comparably sized European city such as Berlin?

 

  1. In what ways did Frederick Law Olmsted's urban vision differ from the standard pattern of American cities?
  2. What factors worked against the development of community life in the suburbs?
  3. In what ways did the suburbs reflect the reality of the American social system?

 

  1. In what ways did the domestic ideal begin to change for middle-class women during the 1890s?

 

  1. What were some of the issues in the "Americanism" controversy in the Catholic Church?

 

  1. In what ways did machine politics contribute to municipal corruption?

 

  1. In what ways did the modern city tend to commercialize and make public formerly private behavior?

 

 

PART TWO:

 

  1. Refer to American Voices, M. Carey Thomas: "We Did Not Know . . . Whether Women's Health Could Stand the Strain of College Education" in Chapter 19 of the text. After reading the document, write a brief paragraph-length response to each of the following questions.

 

In the late nineteenth century, popular custom and belief held by both women and men still maintained that women should be subordinate to men and that their intellects were inferior to those of men. Women who sought an education had to overcome not only the prejudice of others, frequently encouraged by the authority of science as well as religion, but also their own doubts and fears of social ostracism.

 

    1. What kind of doubts troubled M. Carey Thomas and other women who were seeking a college education? How did what Thomas read contribute to these doubts?
    2. How did society react to Thomas's pursuit of higher education?
    3. Why did Thomas feel it was important for women to gain an education?
  1. Refer to American Voices, Anonymous: Bintel Brief in Chapter 19 of the text. After reading the document, write a brief paragraph-length response to each of the following questions.

 

Foreign language papers such as New York's Jewish Daily Forward spoke to and for the concerns of specific ethnic communities. The familiar language, in the Forward's case Yiddish, in part preserved a sense of the immigrants' homelands, but so much was different in this new country that the paper's role included instruction and advice on how to cope with the bewildering array of choices and dilemmas they faced. Many, especially Jewish men, were experiencing a movement away from a life structured by Jewish law found in the Torah—the "five books of Moses" in the Bible—and the Talmud—the body of writing concerning Jewish laws and interpretations—as taught in the yeshivas, schools of religious study. The "Bintel Brief" column records the often plaintive quandaries that troubled the Forward's readers, along with the replies of its editor, Abraham Cahan.

 

    1. What was the Forward's approach to its readers' feelings of being torn between the "Old World" and the "New World"?
    2. What do the questions—and answers—about religion suggest was happening to traditional religious beliefs and practices in America?
    3.  What do the questions regarding love, sex, and marriage indicate about gender issues and youth culture in the United States?