Glossary

Chinese Exclusion Act

Enacted in 1882, this law suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and drastically restricted the rights of the Chinese already in the United States. It was among the early attempts to close the door to immigrants.

dumbbell tenements

Dumbbell tenements were the most notorious example of exploitative urban housing. They made maximum use of standard urban land lots but had many inherent problems.

Leo Frank case

Unjustly convicted of murder, Leo Frank was later taken from state prison and hung. The case demonstrated the pervasive anti-Semitism in American society during the early twentieth century.

local colorists

Local colorists like Bret Harte were the first writers to challenge the genteel tradition in American literature.

Madison Grant

Grant and other writers contributed to racial nativism, which held that new immigrants were biologically inferior to Americans who could trace their ancestries back to northern and western Europe.

Mark Twain

Twain began as a local colorist who used regional dialect, humor, and sentimentality in his novels. He transcended this genre in works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which he explored the darker impulses of human nature.

National Origins Act

The movement to restrict immigration culminated in 1924 with the passage of this act, which limited immigration according to a nationality-based quota system. It provided that no more than 2 percent of any given nationality in America in 1890 could annually immigrate to the United States.

naturalism

Naturalistic writers portrayed individuals as helpless victims battered defenseless by natural forces beyond their control. Influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and eventually Sigmund Freud, naturalists described a world in which biological, social, and psychological forces determined a person's fate.

Stephen Crane

Like Theodore Dreiser, Crane was interested in the effects of poverty and urban life on character. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, depicted the central character as a victim of her environment.

Storyville

Storyville was the red-light district of New Orleans that provided employment for early jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong. Ragtime and the blues, also new forms of urban music, flourished as well in Storyville. It declined during World War I when government officials closed the houses of prostitution as health hazards.

the Cathedral of Commerce

Completed in 1913, the Woolworth Building was the largest building in America. A beautiful building that adopted aspects of both Gothic and Moorish construction, it was known as "the Cathedral of Commerce."

Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser was the premier naturalistic writer, whose first novel Sister Carrie sold poorly because it shocked readers who were accustomed to the genteel tradition. His novels were regarded as realistic treatments of modern industrial society.

walking cities

Mid-nineteenth-century cities were walking cities in which the majority of dwellers walked to and from work. Industrialization, rapid population growth, and the development of mass- transportation systems shattered this arrangement.

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