the idea of cities predates the nineteenth century

It is next to impossible to not  keep "The Nineteenth Century City" (HY 300) course in mind as I write lectures  for "American Civilization to 1865" (HY 103), a survey class that I am also teaching this fall. For sure,  what we call American civilization predates the nineteenth century. Maybe the idea of what it means to be "urban" predates the nineteenth century, too.  For example, I just finished writing a lecture on the Aztec Empire for the American Civilization class. The Aztecs lived in what is now known as Mesoamerica, an area that is essentially from central California down to northern Costa Rica. Some Mesoamericans had cities that were often laid out on a grid much like the grids you see in many large cities today, among them New York.  Here, one could find Teotihuacán, a city that flourished between 150 B.C. and 700 A.D. 

  

Before the Spanish arrived here in the early sixteenth century, the Teotihuacán had an incredibly sophisticated culture.  These once-nomadic people wandered south from northern Mexico and built towering stone temples, broad paved avenues, some 70,000 adobe huts, complete with markets. 

Among the things the students enrolled in this course will want to ponder is why the emergence of urban life in the nineteenth century in the United States was unique. Such a task requires us to think about what means to think historically. Historians are deeply interested in a particular moment, but also how it compares to other moments. What did we have in the nineteenth century that we did not have in, say, 700 A.D.? To what do we look to  distinguish antebellum and postbellum cities in the United States from a city that predates Christopher Columbus' 1492 arrival? Culture? Technology? Nationhood? What do we mean when we say  "culture,"  "technology" and "nationhood"?