Starting in the colonial period, we had port cities. Seeing as there weren't planes or truckers, we kind of had to rely on boats to bring us all those things that we didn't have here in the good ol' Colonies. With more people being in a hub of trade, it made more sense for people to start to actually live where the action was happening, so artisans had the right idea when they decided, "Hey, I could probably make a solid living selling all my goods in this giant trade hub. I'm gonna go ahead and do that." Turns out, it was a pretty rad idea. As more and more people had this genius idea, cities became larger and larger. This is a process I honestly didn't even think of when I was in history classes, and it kind of blows me away that people were okay with this idea. Now don't get me wrong, it seems like common sense, but its the fact that ships from the other countries coming to our ports took months to get here, and people died on these voyages. That's insane to me that people were okay with waiting for these ships to come in and spend that much time on these ships and make their very short living that way. I have to pay for rush delivery because I can't handle the anticipation of waiting for a package. These people waited so long, or they just made their own things and sold them there in the city, thus improving the city and making it larger.
Now, the way the world advanced so quickly is what blows me away. We end up in the industrial era and cities start to really get wild. Railroads, factories, industrial revolutions! People are flocking to cities to get jobs, and thus raising the population a considerable amount. People are raising cities from small towns on the interior land instead of the coast, and this is making a network of cities. More trade hubs, more money, more problems. Of course, word gets out to people on these wonderfully slow ships, and people get the idea to come over to our side of the fence and make their lives here instead of their home country, because we have so many jobs and so many industries to get a piece of the pie on. This is when we, as a country, really start to take some shape. We get the cultural diversity, the racism, and the hate, and all that makes us the United States of America. After all, why should the people that raped and pillaged an entire nation of natives have to share the jobs? That being beside the point, industry started to really make the nation take a new turn and create more and more trade hubs away from the coast and create the great cities that line the way from the coast to the midwest.
Larger cities start to get even larger, and people develop a different culture in the city that what there is outside of them. Ways of life start to change radically inside the city, and there becomes a real separation of what life is like in the city as to life in the country where people are farming and creating the food and livestock for the country. The urbanization starts to really go in to full swing and the metropolis starts to become a real thing instead of just a wild dream.
To me, and my focus on this blog, is how crazy it is how we can actually look at a timeline and see just how this really happened instead of looking at a city and being like, "Wow this is crazy, how did this happen?" It happened over hundreds of years, but in just that short amount of time, technology advanced so rapidly and became a huge staple to people, and the population boomed from word of mouth about a land that was booming with industry. Seeing it on paper, that blows my mind.
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