Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America

by Thomas Bender

Box 15

Genres: History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1975

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in graduate school and appreciated it enough to hang onto it--but then, I'm partial to intellectual history. In lieu of rereading it to provide a review here, I read some of the reviews published in scholarly journals in the fields of geography and history. A few helpful quotations:

- It “takes up the challenge of Lewis Mumford, Leo Marx, and Morton and Lucia White to study the image of the city in the American mind” (Allen F. Davis, Journal of American History)
- It challenges the prevailing notion of “the negative attitude of the intellectual toward the American city…”, “not by claiming that thoughtful Americans uniformly embraced the city, but by raising more probing questions about how they gradually adapted their ideas and institutions to the very real challenge of 19th-century urbanization” (Stuart M. Blumin, New York History)
- It hypothesizes that, “when the non-urban orientation inherited from the Jeffersonian tradition came into conflict with urban-industrial growth, a new urban vision emerged ‘out of the interplay of a New England version of early American agrarian ideals and the modernizing forces associated with the industrial city’ (p. x).” (Louis P. Cain, Journal of Economic History)

Several reviewers found his arguments inadequate and the content repetitive--but it won the Frederick Jackson Turner award, so its scholarly contribution to our understanding of urban thought must have superseded those issues.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study utilizing a wide range of primary materials as well as more contemporary scholarly work, passing between specific cases and more general trends. The book fulfills exactly what it sets out to do (taken from the back cover): "During America's dramatic metamorphosis from agrarian nation to industrial giant, intellectual lines were drawn - or so some historians claim - between pro- and antiurbanization advocates. Such a dichotomy, argues Thomas Bender, is not only simplistic but also needlessly limiting. He chooses to explore the cultural meanings associated with the urbanization process by explicating a distinctive but long-overlooked 'urban vision' that sought to reconcile America's rural heritage with its new industrial life style. [...] As Bender shows, that lost urban vision provided the cultural ideal that gave meaning and coherence to the lives of people caught in an increasingly urban - and alien - environment."