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Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25
From: U.S. History by Crash Course
In which John Green teaches you about the massive immigration to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Immigrants flocked to the US from all over the world in this time period. Millions of Europeans moved to the US where they drove the growth of cities and manned the rapid industrialization that was taking place. In the western US many, many Chinese immigrants arrived to work on the railroad and in mines. As is often the case in the United States, the people who already lived in the US reacted kind of badly to this flood of immigrants. Some legislators tried to stem the flow of new arrivals, with mixed success. Grover Cleveland vetoed a general ban on immigration, but the leadership at the time did manage to get together to pass an anti-Chinese immigration law. Immigrants did win some important Supreme Court decisions upholding their rights, but in many ways, immigrants were treated as second-class citizens. At the same time, the country was rapidly urbanizing. Cities were growing rapidly and industrial technology was developing new wonders all the time. John will cover all this upheaval and change, and hearken back to a time when racial profiling did in fact boil down to analyzing the side of someone's face.
Full Transcript
Growth, Cities, and Immigration Crash Course US History 25
speaker01 00:00:00
Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we're going to continue our extensive look at American capitalism. Mr Green Mr Green I'm sorry, are you saying that I grow up to be a tool of the bourgeoisie? Oh, not just a tool of the bourgeoisie, me from the past, but a card carrying member it. I mean, you have employees whose labor you can exploit because you own the means of production, which in your case includes a chalkboard, a video camera, a desk, and a xenophobic globe. Meanwhile, Stan, Danica, Raul, and Meredith toil and crushing poverty. Did you write this part? These are all lies, cue the intro.
speaker01 00:39:00
So last week, we saw how commercial farming transformed the American West and gave us mythical cowboys, and unfortunately, not so mythical Indian reservations. Today we leave the sticks and head for the cities, as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout the nation's history. I mean, we may like to imagine that the history of America is all go west, young man. But in fact, from Mark Twain to pretty much every hipster in Brooklyn, it's the opposite. The population was growing everywhere in America after 1850, following a major economic downturn in the 1890s, farm prices made a comeback, and that drew more and more people out west to take part in what would eventually be called agriculture's gold age. Although to be fair, agriculture's real golden age was in like 3000 BCE when Mesopotamians were like, dude, if we planted these in rows, we could have more of it than we could eat. It was really more of a second golden age, but anyway, more than a million land claim were filed under the Homestead Act in the 1890s.
speaker01 01:30:00
In between 1919 10, the populations of Texas and Oklahoma together increased by almost 2 million people, and another 800000 people moved into Kansas, the Dakotas and Nebraska. That's people moved two Nebraska, Sorry, I just hadn't yet offended Nebraskans. I'm looking to get through the list before the end of the year, but one of the central reasons that so many people moved out west was that the demand for agricultural products was increasing due to the growth of cities. 1920 of the American population lived in cities, and there were 12 with a population over 100000 people. This rose to 18 cities in 1900, with the percentage of urban dwellers rising to 38%, and by 1920, 68% of Americans lived in cities and 26 cities had a population over. So in the 40 years, around the turn of the 20th th century, America became the world's largest industrial power and went from being predominantly rural to largely urban. This is, to use a technical historian term, a really big deal because it didn't just make cities possible, but also their products.