Introduction

This chapter introduces the book, Psychology and Its Cities. It sketches the book’s argument that the rapid urbanization and industrialization that was experienced by the United States after the Civil War had a profound impact on the development of psychology in American up through World War I. Repeated attempts to organize and defend common laborers against the power of capital, the social stresses caused by mass immigrations into the US, frequent clashes among racial and ethnic groups, and efforts to establish universal public education systems all had their impacts on the ways in which American psychology developed and took root in society in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. Each chapter is briefly summarized.