1. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 346,495-496,551.

2. Ibid., 548, 543.

3. Ibid., 201, 519, figure 28; Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of The American City: 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning From Los Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).

4. Mumford, The Culture of Cities , 166-167.

5. Ibid., 58, figure 30, 72.

6. Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 11, 169. Schaffer, in a remarkably even-handed assessment, points out that Radburn achieved its social harmony by using realtors who "discouraged" Jews and blacks, and that the town itself had no government, that it was run by the company that developed it.

7. Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1963), 9.

8. Mumford, The Culture of Cities , 165, figure 21.

9. Mumford, "Megalopolis as Anti-City," in The Urban Prospect (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 138-140.

10. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (New York: Random House, 1961), 9.

11. Ibid., 15.

12. Ibid., 105.

13. T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Two Richard Sennetts," Journal of American Studies 19 (Fall 1985), 81-94; Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

14. Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

15. James Leiby, Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origins of Labor Statistics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960) describes Wright's career as an enlightened missionary of the movement to gather data that made an enormous impact, perhaps the impact, on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century census data collection. See especially the bibliography of Wright's publications (222-234). The career of his more visible predecessor, Francis A. Walker, director of the 1870 and 1880 census, president of MIT and early activist in the founding of the American Economic Association, is described in James P. Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (New York: Holt, 1922). Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975).

16. Residual Plot of All Data Series Added (Natural Logs), 1790-1960

Source: Calculated from Bureau of the Census,  Historical Statistics of the United States, 
Colonial Times to 1970  (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), A-4-A-9.

17. Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York: Macmillan, 1899); Katharine L. Bradbury, Anthony Downs, and Kenneth A. Small, Urban Decline and the Future of American Cities (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1982), 172-173: the authors look at the relationship of urban poverty to other problems, such as crime, and conclude that perhaps eliminating or at least moving the poor, "deconcentrating the poor," might not be a "long-term remed[y]," but it is "probably a prerequisite" for such long-term remedies. A quick glance at historical and comparative information contradicts their policy recommendation, yet they do not even pursue this intriguing avenue.

18. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) best exemplifies this perception of a fragmented reality. For my discussion of synthesis, see Eric H. Monkkonen, "The Dangers of Synthesis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986), 1146-1157.

19. Some of the better-known city biographies include Bessie L. Pierce, A History of Chicago , 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937-57); Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1965); Blake McKelvey, Rochester , 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, and Rochester: Christopher Press, 1945-61); and Constance M. Green, Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Case History of the Industrial Revolution in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939). Recent examples of this important genre include Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South: 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); and Don H. Doyle, Nashville since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). A recent specialized study is Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

20. Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).

21. The "old" urban history is wonderfully summarized in Charles N. Glaab, "The Historian and the American City: A Bibliographic Survey," in Philip M. Hauser and Leo F. Schnore, eds., The Study of Urbanization (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 53-80. He presciently observes that a "rather dramatic academic breakthrough seems imminent" (72). He cites fourteen essays on historiography, including three in the 1940s; four in the 1950s; and four in the 1960s. For some examples of the new urban history, see Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); idem, The other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History , Yale Conference on the Nineteenth-Century Industrial City, 1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Thernstrom, "Reflections on the New Urban History,'' Daedalus C (Spring 1971), 359-375; idem, "The New Urban History," in Charles F. Delzell, ed., The Future of History: Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1877), 43-52; Kathleen N. Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); idem, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

22. Robert Sweirenga, "Towards the 'The New Rural History': A Review Essay," Historical Methods 6 (1972), 111-122; Hal S. Barron, "Rediscovering the Majority: The New Rural History of the Nineteenth-Century North," Historical Methods 19 (Fall 1986), 141-152.

23. Richard Jensen, "Found: Fifty Million Missing Americans," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association (Rochester, November 1980).

24. Gary W. Cox, David Galenson, and J. Morgan Kousser, "The Log-Linear Analysis of Contingency Tables: An Introduction for Historians," Historical Methods 15 (1982), 152-169; Patrick M. Horan, "Occupational Mobility and Historical Social Structure," Social Science History 9 (1985), 25-48.

25. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

26. Monkkonen, "Residential Mobility in England and the United States, 1850-1900," in Themes in British and American History: A Comparative Approach, c.1760-1970 , (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1985), 77-83.

27. Michael Frisch, "American Urban History as an Example of Recent Historiography," History and Theory 18 (1979), 350-377; idem, "Ladders, Forests, and Racing Trails," Labor History 15 (1973), 461-466; James Henretta, ''Social History as Lived and Written," American Historical Review 84 (December 1979), 1293-1322; James Henretta, "The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias," Labor History XVIII (1977), 165-178; John E. Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1870-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

The radical relativist critique of history is particularly vulnerable. It claims that we must take the past on its own terms, just as some anthropologists claim to do with other cultures. But this assumes that we can know the culturally different and very distant past, a nonrelativist assumption. Thus, we come to the crux of the relativist dilemma: the assumption that other cultures have other mentalities leads to the corollary that they cannot properly be understood from the outside. It may be cultural imperialism to see the past with our modes of analysis, but to do otherwise is an epistemological impossibility, by definition. How could one, for instance, write a properly cultural relativistic history of a group that had as a fundamental belief that there was no such thing as history, only an eternal present? Or could there be a properly appreciative understanding of a group that did not share the modern belief in culture?

28. Some of the new urban historians continue to be optimistic about mobility research; see Howard P. Chudacoff, "Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982), 101-112. The two reanalyses of Thernstrom's data include Gary W. Cox, David Galenson, and I. Morgan Kousser, "The Log-Linear Analysis of Contingency Tables: An Introduction for Historians," Historical Methods 15 (Fall 1982), 152-169, and Patrick M. Horan, "Occupational Mobility and Historical Social Structure," Social Science History 9 (Winter 1985), 25-48.

29. Susanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality .