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It is not generally noticed that Frederick Jackson Turner invokes "the complexity of city life" as early as the second paragraph of his vastly influential essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Nor is it widely noted that references to the city and to America's "manufacturing civilization" are sprinkled throughout his attempt to prove that the original and ongoing encounter with the wilderness was the shaping force in American national development. Turner's rather dark, finde-siède announcement that "the frontier is gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history," invites anxious attention to an inevitable urban-industrial future in the twentieth century and beyond. But the city as both commercial center and workshop is present-one might even say emphasized-throughout Turner's "first period," as the crucial site of history's advance from the primitive to the modern. Turner's key point is not that cities were insignificant in pre-twentieth-century America, but that they grew out of a frontier experience that left a permanent, native imprint upon them (1).
Turner first presented his essay in 1893. Before the century had closed (and before the "Turner thesis" had taken hold among historians), a quite different statement about the nature and meaning of American urbanization appeared under the title The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics(2). Adna Ferrin Weber was perhaps not even aware of Turner's essay when he compiled and analyzed available statistics of urban concentration; in any case, the assumptions and conclusions of The Growth of Cities are strikingly opposed to those of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Weber begins his statistical compilation with American data, but he quickly moves on to Europe, and from there, so far as the data were available to him, to the rest of the world. More importantly, Weber insists that urbanization, even in its American manifestation, is a global phenomenon. Cities arise and grow for many of the same reasons, and often in a similar fashion, all across the world, and are linked in various ways within a growing network of regional, national, and international exchange. Weber, indeed, finds an interesting way of conveying the global character of urbanization, even within an essentially Western frame. His book begins by comparing...