Aaron Douglas
(1899–1979).Painter. A leader of the Harlem Renaissance, he led the way for African-American artists to employ explicitly black themes, fostering a resurgence of racial pride in black art. Born in ...
Agricultural Experiment Stations.
By the 1880s, industrialization and urbanization in America were generating increasing demands for farm products, while the plains and western states were producing surpluses for a developing ...
Agricultural Marketing
This entry contains three subentries, overviews of regional and international trade, and a discussion of agricultural marketing boards.The marketing of agricultural produce probably goes back to the ...
Amusement Parks
The roots of today's amusement parks date back to the 1500s, when so-called pleasure gardens began opening on the outskirts of major European cities. In addition to primitive rides, these ...
amusements and recreation
Dickens had a profound interest in popular recreation, and reference to it suffuses his early fiction and his journalism throughout his life. His basic philosophy can be found in the ...
Anti-Catholic Movement.
Inherited from British sectarianism, anti-Catholicism became the core ingredient in the American nativist movement. Like English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Protestants, many Anglo-Americans ...
anti-urbanism
An intellectual current and strand of social science writing which is critical of the city as a social form. Negative attitudes to urbanization—and the ‘pastoral myth’ of the countryside—predate the ...
Baltimore, Maryland, Slavery In
Although it was by and large a slave city, Baltimore boasted a large free black population, which included Frederick Douglass's wife, Anna Murray, who worked for a postman on the ...
Black Abolitionists
Historians acknowledge the existence of “two abolitionisms” in the antebellum United States—one black, one white. Although black and white abolitionists shared similar views about the moral evil of ...
Black Family
The television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which traced the history of a black family beginning with its African progenitor, Kunta Kinte, aired to wide public acclaim in the ...
Black Migration
Black migration within colonial America was a result of the demand for labor and the dynamics of white migration in the region. As the American economy grew and settlers pushed ...
Black Towns
Black women have been the cultural, social, and economic support of black towns in America for centuries. There were Senegalese enclaves in Louisiana in the 1700s. In the late eighteenth ...
California
It is estimated that approximately 300,000 Native Americans inhabited the area now know as California before Spanish explorers arrived in search of wealth. On September 28, 1542, an expedition led ...
Census, Federal.
The decennial population census originated in the 1787 federal Constitution as a mechanism for determining each state's political representation in the House of Representatives and electoral college. ...
Charity Organization Movement.
The charity organization movement was a late nineteenth-century philanthropic reform that sought to bring rich and poor together even as the forces of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization ...
Chicago Fire.
The Chicago fire of 8–10 October 1871 is perhaps the most famous urban disaster in American history. Its exact cause is unknown, notwithstanding the legend that it was started by ...
childhood
A variable social construction, the concept of childhood barely existed in early America. In fact, this special period of growth and development experienced before accepting adult responsibilities ...
cholera
n. an acute infection of the small intestine by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea (known as ricewater stools) leading to dehydration. The disease is contracted ...
City Planning.
City planning arose early in American life. European colonizers designed St. Augustine (Spain, 1565), New Amsterdam (Holland, 1625–1626), Williamsburg (England, 1699), and New Orleans (France, 1722) ...
