President of Solimar Research Group looks at the history of natural and man-made disasters in Los Angeles over the past 40 years, focusing particularly on recent unrest beginning in 1992. He considers efforts to revitalize and unify the city in the wake of these events and whether these efforts have been successful.
Professor Edward T. Linenthal discusses the similarities and differences in cultural reactions to the events of September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of April 19, 1995. He explores the co-construction of narrative and memorial process in light of considerations for the World Trade Center and a memorial at the site.
Professor William J. Mitchell and Ph.D. candidate Anthony M. Townsend examine the rebuilding of the digital telecommunications infrastructure in Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks, look at how telecommunications has changed the structure of a city's recovery from disaster, and consider how digital infrastructure may be better protected in future.
Professors Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas Kochan, and J. Phillip Thompson discuss issues related to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of New Orleans. Vale looks at past urban disasters and how these cities have changed and recovered; Kochan contrasts Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to Pearl Harbor with Bush's to Katrina; and Thompson looks at racial tension in New Orleans, prior to and after the hurricane.
What can we learn about the importance of population change and industrial development in Detroit, MI? What does the Detroit story tell us about industrialization in American history? Do upsurges or downturns in the population become permanent? Or do they change direction again? Where do the people come from who determine the population changes, and where do they go? The 2010 Census and other demographic data helped me answer these questions for myself. Students can use demographic data to answer questions in similar ways.
Detroit's volatile population changes drew media attention in the spring of 2011 as the 2010 Census figures were being rolled out. I became curious about the reasons for this population change. The overall U.S. population reached 308 million in 2010, about a 10% growth rate, from 2000. Most states and major urban areas grew at a 1% per year rate. There were, however, a few areas which did not grow, but declined. One of those was Detroit.
I wanted to know more about the situation with Detroit and why people came and left at different times in its history. I looked into Detroit's population history through the once-a-decade census reports that are available from the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2010 Census website, and the University of Virginia's Historical Census Browser. The Census Bureau also published the American Community Survey in the years 2005–2009 that covers occupations, social statistics, housing, mobility, language use, country of origin, and other data. These surveys are available on Detroit's Population and Housing Narrative Profile and in its American FactFinder.
To get a feel for the demographic volatility in the history of Detroit since 1850, I examined the Census figures for each year and the percentages of increase or decrease:
Now that I had the numbers, I looked for interpretations. An NBC analysis of Census figures attributes the Detroit population decline to "steady downsizing of the auto industry":
Detroit's population peaked at 1.8 million in 1950, when it ranked fifth nationally. But the new numbers reflect a steady downsizing of the auto industry—the city's economic lifeblood for a century—and an exodus of many residents to the suburbs. Detroit's population plunged 25% in the past decade to 713,777, the lowest count since 1910, four years before Henry Ford offered $5 a day to autoworkers, sparking a boom that quadrupled the Motor City's size in the first half of the 20th century.
This led me to ask, what did Detroit's actual population look like in earlier years? I examined some of these periods of time, using older census data. The 1950 U.S. Census found that the population of the city was 1,849,568. It had grown by over 200,000 from its 1940 population of 1,623,452. The foreign-born population was 276,000 from Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, the USSR, England/Wales, and Scotland. The black population was 300,506. The 1910 U.S. Census revealed that the total population was 465,786. The native white population was 115,106, the black population was 85,000, and the foreign born was 156,555. The foreign born of this era came from Germany, Canada, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland.
Finally, I checked Detroit's pre-industrial censuses from 1850 to 1880 and found the area to be rural but commercially active as a Great Lakes port. It grew rapidly in these years, but had only a small fraction of the population it would later have during the rapid growth of the auto industry.
Now I had another question. Where did the people who contributed to this growth come from? The Detroit News' website, detnews.com, gave me an answer in an article by Vivian Baulch entitled "Michigan's Greatest Treasure-its people." This article presents an ethnic description of Detroit from the time that it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad through the boom years of the auto industry. The article concludes with a quote by historian Arthur Woodford:
Detroit has "the largest multi-ethnic population of any city in the United States. Detroit has the largest Arabic-speaking population outside of the Middle East, the second largest Polish population in America (only Chicago has more), and the largest U.S. concentration of Belgians, Chaldeans and Maltese."
Another source is the U.S. Senate's hearings in 1908–1911 on Immigration and Industry. Known as the Dillingham Commission, the hearings' 31 volumes have been digitized by Stanford University's e-brary. Volume 8 provides an insight into Detroit's diversity as shown by the children of immigrant workers in their school settings.
These population figures, when I connected them to the rapid growth and consolidation of the auto industry and the upsurge in immigration and internal migration, gave me an overview of what happened in Detroit. It showed a boom and bust cycle in industry and the apparent willingness of many people to leave the city and/or metropolitan area when economic conditions are bad. The rise and decline of the American auto industry helped me get a grip on industrialization as a major factor in population growth and decline. Other industries such as iron, steel, car parts, batteries, tires, and glass are at least partially dependent on, or tied to, the fortunes of the auto industry, and thus whatever happens to the auto industry in Detroit has an impact on the national industrial scene. Other nearby formerly industrial cities have demographics similar to Detroit's. However, the decline may not be permanent. The auto industry has begun a modest revival and may continue to grow in the near future. Detroit is still the center of this industry and may again rise to a greater position of prominence among American cities.
By exploring census and other demographic data, students can form their own historical questions and answer them by tracing quantitative and interpretative information, just as I did. Population and industry shifts can rarely be understood from one source. Ask a question and use the information you find to assemble you own answer.
Associated Press. "Census: Detroit's population plummets 25 percent". March 22, 2011. Accessed May 26, 2011.
Baulch, Vivian. "Michigan's Greatest Treasure-its people." Detroit News. September 4, 1999. Accessed May 26, 2011.
Intimidated by the thought of working with quantitative data (numbers)? Professor Gary Kornblith guides you through finding and interpreting such data.
If you're looking for some numbers to crunch, more than 50 websites we've reviewed feature quantitative data. Last year, our blog also suggested ideas for teaching with census data.
Soaring food prices, a hunger for locally grown produce, high obesity rates, and the desire by people to reconnect with nature and with each other have sparked a national renaissance in community gardening. As part of this movement, school gardens are sprouting up everywhere. Teachers are using these green spaces to teach a variety of subjects, including horticulture, nutrition, history, science, math, writing, and art.
The idea of incorporating gardens in schools began in the late 19th century when Henry Lincoln Clapp, a teacher at the George Putnam Grammar School in Boston, MA, established the first school garden. Inspired after visiting school gardens in Europe, Clapp created a wildflower and vegetable garden at Putnam in 1891 with support from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The establishment of school gardens soon spread throughout the state and eventually became a nationwide movement, with an estimated 75,000 school gardens by 1906.
For garden advocates, integrating school gardens in the public schools served many purposes. It was a way to get city children outside, engage them in physical activity, and instill in them a sense of pride and teamwork as they cultivated and maintained their gardens. Gardening classes provided students with vocational and agricultural training. Teachers taught a variety of subjects through garden activities. Students practiced writing by keeping planting journals and writing compositions about the garden. Math skills were acquired by counting seeds, measuring garden plots, and determining the appropriate soil depth for planting. Students learned botany and entomology by observing plants and insects and their interrelationships. Geography and history came into play when students studied the origins of fruits and vegetables and planting customs among different cultures. The gardens provided inspiration for drawing, painting, and performing music. In 1914, the federal government established the Bureau of Education’s Office of School and Home Gardening, which promoted school gardens and provided “how-to” pamphlets and course guides.
Children’s involvement in gardening took on a new urgency when the United States entered World War I in 1917. In order to provide food to European allies facing a food crisis and to U.S. troops fighting overseas, citizens were encouraged to grow food for domestic consumption as part of the war garden campaign. Children were enlisted to join the School Garden Army, which adopted the motto, “A garden for every child, every child in a garden.” Students became important contributors to the garden campaign, growing thousands of dollars worth of produce in their school and home gardens.
When the United States entered World War II, children once again played an active role in growing fruits and vegetables to assist in the war effort. During the war, citizens were encouraged to establish victory gardens in their backyards, vacant lots, and schools to provide food for civilians and troops. Gardening was also promoted to boost morale, encourage physical activity and healthy eating and to help Americans deal with the stresses of war. The U.S. Office of Education encouraged victory gardening at schools and promoted school lunch programs that served locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. The Boy Scouts of America, 4-H clubs, parks and recreation departments, churches, and many civic organizations were involved in victory gardening programs for children. In 1944, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that victory gardens produced 40 percent of the vegetables that were consumed nationally.
The post-war suburban housing boom of the 1950s and 1960s generated more interest in backyard gardening than in community gardening. This changed in the 1970s when rising food prices, an increase in environmental awareness, and a desire by citizens to revitalize neighborhoods plagued by crime and neglect sparked a new community garden movement. Citizens and non-profit groups, such as Boston Urban Gardeners and New York’s Green Guerillas, turned vacant lots into colorful, productive green spaces. The U.S. Department of Agriculture initiated the Urban Garden Program in 1976 to help residents in major cities grow their own food. Educators and activists who were concerned that children were disconnected from nature and unaware of where their food came from reached out to young people and encouraged them to participate in neighborhood, youth, and school gardens. In a 1974 article in the Washington Post, writer Henry Mitchell noted that in Washington, DC, “there are 1,000 small gardens about town in which children grow such plants as the radish, the onion, and (as the weather stops being barbarous) the tomato.”
Since the 1970s, the popularity of school and youth gardens has grown steadily. California took the lead in 1995 by launching the “Garden in Every School” program. As in the school garden movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, teachers are utilizing these outdoor classrooms to teach a wide range of academic subjects through hands-on experiential activities. In addition, educators are using school gardens to encourage a healthier lifestyle, promote environmental stewardship and provide students with the opportunity to develop leadership and team-building skills.
These free resources provide ideas on how to incorporate school gardens into the academic curriculum, including social studies:
Lawson, Laura. City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Mitchell, Henry. “A Child’s Garden in The City.” The Washington Post, May 19, 1974.
School Gardens with Constance Carter. Library of Congress webcast.
Test your knowledge of (modern) historical gardening with our quiz on victory gardens!
This extensive archive offers more than 13,200 photographs taken in California between 1921 and 1965 by Jervie Henry Eastman. The collection includes photographs, negatives, and postcards "for a wide variety of northern California locations and events, including dam construction, logging, mining, food processing, and community buildings and activities." Eastman established his photo studio in 1921.
Clicking on the thumbnail images brings up a larger version of the photograph with descriptive data. For some of the images it is necessary to select "more information about this image" to find the specific subject of the photograph. This selection also provides a subject cross-reference list. Search is by keyword only. The collection is of interest to those researching the history of northern California and those interested in urban history or historical geography.
Kenneth Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, describes the ways in which 19th-century cities evolved from disorganized, unregulated communities into modern cities focusing on order, safety, and public health. Professor Jackson looks at the motivations behind these developments as well as implementation strategies.
I recently read that nasal snuff was initially popular because it allowed one to drown out unpleasant smells of people not bathing and of piled up sewage. Is it true that a few hundred years ago cities stank all the time?
The claim about snuff is doubtful, or at least exaggerated, but yes, cities did often stink. A modern urban dweller, traveling back in time, but remaining in the same place, might well be bowled over by the olfactory experience.
In 1494, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his 2nd voyage noted that the Indians they encountered used tobacco in two ways. The first was by smoking it through a cane pipe, the end of which they placed into their mouths. The second was by inhaling powdered tobacco through the pipe directly into their noses—“which purges them very much,” according to the friar. The European explorers took up both practices, of smoking and snuffing, and spread them simultaneously worldwide.
An anonymous poem published in London in Read’s Weekly Journal in 1761, entitled, “Six Reasons for Taking a Pinch of Snuff,” begins with the verse: “When strong perfumes, and noisome scents,/ The suf’fring nose invade,/ Snuff, best of Indian weeds, presents/ Its salutary aid.”
Popular medical theory of the day attributed many diseases to ill winds or “miasmas” of various kinds, so good odors in the nose, introduced by way of perfumed handkerchiefs, powdered wigs, incensed smoke, or scented snuff, were thought to be able to block or counter illnesses.
Despite this, the popularity of snuff was not due solely, or even primarily, to its usefulness in drowning out unpleasant smells. Users of the 17th and 18th century waxed particularly poetic about snuff’s own palette of scents, its ability to promote fellowship and sociability among friends and strangers, and the physiological effects consequent upon imbibing nicotine, but without the smoke.
Personal cleanliness has long been seen as a social virtue, as a way to be polite to others. Consequently, failure in this has been regarded as an offense against others. Steps toward cleanliness were also seen as steps toward gentility, as progressive steps advancing in social class, as distinguishing oneself from the lower classes. Until fairly recently, in urban America, washing one’s body, like washing one’s clothes, has been more fastidiously attended to the higher up the scale of social class in which one has found oneself. Keeping oneself and one's living space clean is easier, too, if one can hire servants to do the chores, and if one does not engage in heavy physical labor in order to make a living, and if one can afford a place to live that has indoor plumbing.
The considerable animus against immigrants that was especially strong in the 19th century led to a presumption that odorlessness would be one desired outcome of immigrants' assimilation into American society. The elimination of body odor was part of that, it also referred to exotic perfumes, as well as the smells of ethnic cuisine, especially its characteristic spices and aromatic vegetables, in various city neighborhoods.
The raft of related social reform movements that began in the U.S. at the beginning of the 19th century included hygiene, considering cleanliness as a kind of moral virtue, embodying the cleanliness of the soul, and purifying the body politic. The emission of body odors signaled a moral lapse, an assault on others’ privacy and personal space. The antidote was cold water, applied liberally to the system, inside and outside. In the 20th century, widespread military service introduced people to an enforced regimen of soap and water that they continued when they returned to civilian life.
Changing over time as well has been the conventional judgment of whether the larger society has the right or obligation to demand personal cleanliness, to purify those who offend against the nose, and even to exclude them from public places. Advertising for personal hygiene products demonstrates that the public was progressively sensitized, from about 1920 to 1960, to more stringent social stigmas attached to emitting body odors of various kinds, most especially underarm odor and bad breath. The basic message was that if you had such odors, you had no hope of landing a desirable mate.
City smells used to be a lot more pungent than they are today. Humans shared their space with populations of horses, pigs, cows, and chickens. Visitors to Cincinnati in the early 1800s, for example, often wrote about the omnipresence of semi-feral pigs that wandered through the streets, adding to the odor of the enormous pork processing industry of the city.
It was not until the early 19th century that many people had the notion that public cleanliness—as a measure against garbage in the street, offal, noxious effluvia from industrial processes going on right in the midst of the city, and polluting smoke—was something that civil authorities should attempt to police. This resulted in street paving, public water supplies to individual dwellings, municipal garbage collection, waste treatment plants, and industrial zoning regulations.
Nevertheless, civil authorities did not consider odor to be the prime offender to public peace. Metropolitan municipalities in the 19th century were spurred to clean up their cities in order to combat the spread of disease, especially at first in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New Orleans. These cities were periodically afflicted by cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhoid. The abatement of odors was a byproduct, rather than a goal, of these efforts.
Virginia Sarah Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Jim Drobnick, editor, The Smell Culture Reader. New York: Berg, 2006.
E. R. Billings, Tobacco: Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce, with an account of its various modes of use, from its first discovery until now. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1875.
A collection of 10 exhibits documenting aspects of the local history of Austin, TX. Each exhibit contains approximately 40 images and essays from 1,000 to 3,000 words in length. Topics include working in the city, the suffrage movement, life in the city during World War II, Victorian houses, city streets, the erection of the state capital building, landscaping, the historic suburban Hyde Park area, and memorable "firsts" in Austin.
The site links to the main local history site for the Austin Public Library—the Austin History Center—which provides a 2,400-word student essay on Austin's growth during its first 100 years, a chronology of the city from 18301900, and links to other relevant sites, including one presenting hundreds of historic postcards of the city. Useful for those studying Texas, urban, and western history.