Urban History in North America

Abstract

History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.

Wrestling with the angel: on problems of definition in urban historiography

“…36 As a consequence American urban sociologists perceived the town as an 'organic, yet man-made community'. 37 The Chicago school, the first scholarly community to be engaged in the scientific -or non-moralisticdefinition of the phenomenon 'town', was strongly influenced by organological thinking. R.D.…”

“…According to them, Diamond was protesting against 'the familiar notion that urban society constituted an organic yet man-made community, a distinctive society different from that of the countryside or the frontier'. 50 Diamond's protest also won applause from another corner. In 1942 the demographer Hope Eldridge Tisdale published her article, 'The process of urbanization'.…”