The Rise of the Cities: 1820 - 1920 by James Lincoln Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

By the mid-nineteenth century many cities sported lavish theaters, dance halls, and open-air entertainment gardens. This picture shows one of the most famous of them, Niblo's Garden, in New York City.

So it was with sports. So long as most Americans lived on farms and in small towns, a horse race, wrestling match, or ballgame could attract at best a few hundred spectators, not enough to make such an event very profitable. Sports were almost entirely homemade by amateurs. But in cities it was possible to gather crowds of thousands, or even tens of thousands. By 1900 there were major-league baseball teams in most big cities east of the Mississippi and minor-league teams in other cities and towns elsewhere. Horse racing was becoming a major sport, and college football was attracting attention. Sports, like entertainment, were becoming big business centered in the cities.

The city, with its own dynamic, actually changed much about the way people lived their lives. But in an even more subtle way, it changed the way people thought, too. To begin with, on the farms and in country villages, life was regulated by the sun and the moon, and weather was a daily matter of critical importance: A day's activities had to take weather into account. But workers in the factories and offices at the big cities ran their lives by clocks, and weather was simply a minor nuisance.

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