Churches, civic organizations, and the secular settlement house movement all sought to provide some relief to the urban working class, but conditions remained brutal for many new city dwellers Urbanization spread rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century due to a confluence of factors.

New technologies, such as electricity and steam engines, transformed factory work, allowing factories to move closer to urban centers and away from the rivers that had previously been vital sources of both water power… The growth of factories—as well as innovations such as electric lighting, which allowed them to run at all hours of the day and night—created a massive need for workers, who poured in from both rural areas of the…

settlement house movement — an early progressive reform movement, largely spearheaded by women, which sought to offer services such as childcare and free healthcare to help the working poor. City Beautiful — a movement begun by Daniel Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmsted, who believed that cities should be built with three core tenets in mind: the inclusion of parks within city limits…. Great Migration — the name for the large wave of African Americans who left the South after the Civil War, mostly moving to cities in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. instrumentalism — a theory promoted by John Dewey, who believed that education was key to the search for the truth about ideals and institutions.