Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For most of the twentieth century, the actual year of the founding of Santa Fe was a matter of historical speculation, and the name of its founder, Juan Martinez de Montoya, has only recently been accepted by scholars.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Tenochtitlan’s precarious, dynamic order was held together by a passionate devotion to religion and the discharging of the Aztecs’ special and ever-expanding obligation to the gods.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Massachusetts’ earliest laws were hostile to bowling.”

“How to establish a French province in America without immigration? A solution presented itself in the transformation of Indians into Frenchmen.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The sense of purpose that guided settlers, that covered the distance from old to new, created a most bourgeois environment of great expectations, of possibilities, even entitlement.”

“[S]ilver was the magnet, the engine, the driving passion, the dazzling reward.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In a city increasingly characterized by class and ethnic distinctions, the trip in by train was arguably the one significant personal experience that more Chicagoans had in common than any other.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Both the supporters and detractors of the Vigilance Committee claimed to have not only God and the right, but also ‘the ladies’ on their side.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“This was the great idea that, out of the wreckage of Spanish imperialism to which the Catholic Church had attached itself, came from the variously sanctified and base mixings of the Americas: the stunning idea that people were not one thing or the other, nor even some cross between two civilizations, but some new mestizaje, some new way of being altogether.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“With the cities’ growing political awareness and new methods and ideas, Bridenbaugh celebrates them as the seedbeds of a nascent American identity, the Enlightenment in the New World, the American Revolution, and its concurrent social transformations.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Urban Crucible and some of Nash’s articles from the 1970s provided a model of how crucial and previously unknown details of the lives of ordinary people could be extracted from dry-as-dust tax lists, account books, and the like, and used to tell a new story of how the colonial city worked.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The social center of Havana was in its harbor. Something interesting happened there almost every day.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“[O]ur authors have consciously adopted an untraditional approach to urban history, illustrating the social, legal, and political workings of these young urban societies by writing about a particular incident, a place, an encounter, a person, or a group of urban people.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Why would clergymen of the Reformed Church use their office to baptize the offspring of men and women claimed as property by the Dutch West India Company, the premier slave-trading company of the seventeenth century?”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“When the legislature was occupied with other matters, the inattention permitted a kind of anarchy. Nowhere is the fluidity more apparent than in the naming of streets.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The water brought life to the slope—and sometimes death.”

    Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Daily life in the city often was an adventure on its own.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The fact that everyone in the city helped to build or run the new government led to a new kind of domesticity that was literally shaped by national politics, although in ways L’Enfant and Washington could not have foreseen.”

“Whites were free, blacks were slaves. Yet there was constant interaction.”

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