Photographer Simon Smith did an amazing job of layering present-day London on images shot in 1924 by Harry B. Parkingson and Frank Miller. I discovered this on Open Culture, an online platform for free digital material. See Simon's project in this YouTube clip.
While 1924 is hardly in the nineteenth century, thankfully Gunther Barth, one of the scholars to whom this class will turn, allows us some leeway in critically capturing the moment when you can clearly see rising urban life. He offers the early nineteenth to early twentieth century window as a great place to begin if you are trying to understand the emergence of urban culture in the United States, that's for sure. To him, such a culture - which, incidentally, came after the growth of cities in Europe - witnesses the arrival of newspapers, vaudeville houses, baseball, department stores and apartment houses. These are sites to make new discoveries about the ways in which urban people of different origins found collective meaning in their everyday lives. City-dwellers, he tells us, eased their stress by being spectators at vaudeville shows and baseball games. Some read newspapers to learn English. Others did so to simply learn more about each other and America. Many such people were relieved to learn they were not the only ones suffering in cramped spaces, which required the construction of apartment houses where several families could live. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in the rural communities for the first time in U.S. history. So 1924 is more than adequate to probe the historical significance of this space.
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