SEX _Elsie Clews Parsons_ 309 THE FAMILY _Katharine Anthony_ 319 THE ALIEN _Frederic C. Howe_ 337 RACIAL MINORITIES _Geroid Tanquary Robinson_ 351 ADVERTISING _J. Thorne Smith_ 381 BUSINESS _Garet Garrett_ 397 ENGINEERING _O. S. Beyer, Jr._ 417 NERVES _Alfred B. Kuttner_ 427 MEDICINE _Anonymous_ 443 SPORT AND PLAY _Ring W. Lardner_ 457 HUMOUR _Frank M. Colby_ 463 AMERICAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE FOREIGN POINT OF VIEW I AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT _Henry L. Stuart_ 469 II AS AN IRISHMAN SEES IT _Ernest Boyd_ 489 III AS AN ITALIAN SEES IT _Raffaello Piccoli_ 508 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 527 WHO’S WHO OF THE CONTRIBUTORS 557 INDEX 565 CIVILIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES THE CITY Around us, in the city, each epoch in America has been concentrated and crystallized. In building our cities we deflowered a wilderness. To-day more than one-half the population of the United States lives in an environment which the jerry-builder, the real estate speculator, the paving contractor, and the industrialist have largely created. Have we begotten a civilization? That is a question which a survey of the American city will help us to answer. If American history is viewed from the standpoint of the student of cities, it divides itself roughly into three parts. The first was a provincial period, which lasted from the foundation of Manhattan down to the opening up of ocean commerce after the War of 1812. This was followed by a commercial period, which began with the cutting of canals and ended with the extension of the railroad system across the continent, and an industrial period, that gathered force on the Atlantic seaboard in the ’thirties and is still the dominant economic phase of our civilization. These periods must not be looked upon as strictly successive or exclusive: the names merely express in a crude way the main aspect of each era. It is possible to telescope the story of America’s colonial expansion and industrial exploitation by following the material growth and the cultural impoverishment of the American city during its transformations.