AMERICAN CITIES

American Cities

American Cities

Introduction

Britain's American colonies smashed with the mother homeland in 1776 and were identified as the new territory of the United States of America next the Treaty of Paris in 1783. During the 19th and 20th centuries, 37 new states were supplemented to the initial 13 as the territory amplified over the North American countries and came by several overseas possessions. The two most traumatic knowledge in the nation's annals were the Civil War (1861-65), in which a to the north Union of states beaten a secessionist Confederacy of 11 south slave states, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, an financial worsening throughout which about a quarter of the work force lost its jobs. Buoyed by triumphs in World Wars I and II and the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US continues the world's most mighty territory state.

American State Capitals

A state capital is at once a capitol (both words are pronounced identically), a municipality, and a symbol of the state. This refers to Americans' relationship to their cities as well as to the links between capital cities and other cities in their states.

In the American federal system, urban primacy and politics follow a different logic. State capitals are highly heterogeneous and form a parallel urban network, disconnected from the classical American urban network, largely based on economic dynamics and linkages. The population of state capitals ranged from 8,035 (in Montpelier) to 5,819,000 (in Boston) in 2000, and capitals' share of the state's population ranged from 7 percent (Frankfort, Annapolis, and Jefferson City) to 113 percent (in Providence, Rhode Island, where the metropolitan area exceeds the limits of the state).

Capitals are singular in the American urban fabric, from physical and social points of view. It could be contended that capitals are the “most American” of the nation's cities because, owing to their diversity, they are symbols of the United States of America.

Their platting stages and translates the polity in the physical pattern of the capital city. Carefully planned under public initiative and investment, they mostly depart from the supposed uniformity of American cities through the erection of monuments on symbolic locations, the most impressive of which are the capitols. Once symbols of the reality of statehood, they have become symbols of permanence, linking the states with their history. Capitals host and stage the most important public spaces and places in their states, capitol grounds being the most visible ones. However, unanimity was never reached, since these “public” places were mainly built by white men for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, thus excluding numerous minorities, including Native Americans, African Americans, and women.

To find an explanatory model, several factors have to be intertwined. Most of the current state capitals were selected during the 19th century, 35 of them before 1861, an era of pioneer and idealized territorial vision. Their story thus connects them with the Jeffersonian ideal—a democracy based upon small but educated farmers. The search for centrality in the location of capitals was indeed not merely a ...