Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Dan Horner

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (4) ◽  
pp. 662-664
Author(s):  
Donald Fyson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Experience

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

scholarly journals Editorial

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Great War

I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel. Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’ middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic, back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as well, between the rural and urban experience.

Municipal Socialism, Enterprise and Trading in the Victorian City

Urban History ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 36-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Kellett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Municipal Policy ◽  
Recent Immigrants ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Uk

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.

scholarly journals Reflections on Rails and the City

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
George Revill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Personal Mobility ◽  
City Life ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The City ◽  
Rail Travel

As the articles in this special section show, railways mark out urban experience in very distinctive ways. In the introduction, Steven D. Spalding makes plain there is no clear relationship between railway development and the shape and size of cities. For many cities, suburban rail travel has been either substantially insignificant or a relative latecomer as a factor in urban growth and suburbanization. Walking, tramways and the omnibus may indeed have had a much greater impact on built form, yet the cultural impact of railways on the city life should not be minimized. Iconic city stations are both objects of civic pride and socially heterogeneous gateways to the promise of a better urban life. The physical presence of substantial tracts of infrastructure, viaducts, freight yards and warehousing, divide and segregate residential districts encouraging and reinforcing status differentials between communities. Subways, metros, and suburban railways open on to the often grubby quotidian underbelly of city life whilst marking out a psychic divide between work and domesticity, city and suburb. Railways not only produced new forms of personal mobility but by defining the contours, parameters, and possibilities of this experience, they have come to help shape how we think about ourselves as urbanized individuals and societies. The chapters in this special section mark out some of this territory in terms of, for example: suburbanization, landscape, and nationhood (Joyce); the abstractions of urban form implicit in the metro map (Schwetman); the underground as a metaphor for the topologically enfolded interconnections of urban process (Masterson-Algar); and the competing lay and professional interests freighting urban railway development (Soppelsa). In the introduction Spalding is right to stress both the multiple ways that railways shape urban experience and the complex processes that continuously shape and re-shape urban cultures as sites of contest and sometimes conflict. As Richter suggests, in the nineteenth century only rail travel demanded the constant and simultaneous negotiation of both urban social disorder and the systematic ordering associated with large technological systems and corporate business. Thus “the railroad stood squarely at the crossroad of the major social, business, cultural and technological changes remaking national life during the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America

Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 143-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Kasson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Social Orders

This essay represents an effort to understand how members of the middle class adjusted to the emergent urban-industrial order in the nineteenth century. In particular, I wish to inquire into what changes in social behavior, in emotional regulation, ultimately in identity this order entailed. I shall pursue these issues through the study of what may at first appear an unlikely source: the multitude of American etiquette manuals published between 1830 and 1910. Such materials can substantially enlarge our understanding of how behavior and identity were shaped and the cultural and social orders adjusted and maintained, as middle-class Americans encountered the momentous changes of a new urban-industrial society. This essay will concentrate on urban experience because here the problems of adjustment were most intense; but I would argue that as the process of capitalist development and modernization advanced, the styles of life and modes of consciousness first developed in cities came to a large extent to dominate the nation as a whole.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Assael
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eating Out ◽  
The Way ◽  
Metropolitan History

The epilogue begins with consideration of the way the nineteenth-century London restaurant features in individual and collective memory. It insists that such memories were not exclusively characterized by notions of dispossession, melancholy, or regret, and the distance between eating out in the middle of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century was often expressed through the sentiments of progress and improvement. It then moves on to a reflection on how returning the restaurant to a central role in our understanding of metropolitan history in the Victorian and Edwardian period has important connotations for how the history of Modern Britain, more broadly, might be researched and written. In particular, the restaurant requires more attention to be given to the more materially grounded aspects of the urban experience as much as it does to the more abstracted motifs of representation, performance, and subjectivity.

Reproducing Walt Whitman: The Camera, the Omnibus and Leaves of Grass

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Orvell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
European City ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The City ◽  
Growing Population

We have thought of whitman as an urban poet for so long-noticing how integral his Manhattan is to the imagery of Leaves of Grass – that we have lost sight of the deeper structure of urban popular culture lying behind the poem. As Remy G. Saisselin has recently argued, the city in the nineteenth century transformed the eye of the observer, and new kinds of urban spaces and entertainments—like the arcade, the panorama, and the department store—were created to satisfy a growing population of consumers. Saisselin affirms, moreover, that an unprecedented variety of aesthetic observer evolved along with these changes in urban experience: No longer was he “the man of taste in contemplation before a picture or a landscape. … He was the flaneur in the modern city.” And he associates this new observer with the photographer, whose urban gaze was also ubiquitous, surveying urban types and spaces. Saisselin is speaking here primarily of the European city, of Paris especially, but his observations are valuable in considering anew the sources of Whitman's art, for they point to a relationship between poetry and the urban milieu that has been generally overlooked. More specifically, they lead us to see the invention of Leaves of Grass as a way of organizing and perceiving reality that was new in the arts of the nineteenth century, yet one that was rooted in the popular urban culture of the time.

Reassessing the towns of southern Wales in the later middle ages

Urban History ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
SPENCER DIMMOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Late Medieval

On the basis of an emerging reassessment of the medieval urban experience in southern Wales, this article seeks to challenge the predominant view of Wales as being overwhelmingly rural before the nineteenth century. The study of Welsh towns has been limited by the survival of sources that in other regions have generated a renewed interest in the study of medieval urban society. Employing unusual sources that are available, generalizations are made here from the findings of case studies of two towns, Haverfordwest and Chepstow, in order to contribute to a regional synthesis of the urban experience in southern Wales. From this regional synthesis it will be possible to compare urban society in late medieval southern Wales with other regions in Britain and Europe in order to determine its particular characteristics, and with implications for later developments.

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