SECTION A TALK

　　The first area in American urban history extended from the early 17th century to about 1840. Throughout those years the total urban population remained small and so with the cities. At the first federal censors in 1790, city dwellers made up nearly 5.1% of the total population and only two places had more than 25000 inhabitants. Fifty years later only 10.8% of the national population fell into the urban category and only one city, New York, contained more than 250000 people. Largely because of the unsophisticated modes of transportation, even the more populous phrases in the early 19th century remained small enough that people could easily work from one end of the city to the other in those days.
　　Though smaller in modern standards these working cities, as it were, performed variety of functions in those days. One was economic. Throughout the pre-modern era, this part of urban life remained so overwhelmingly commercial that almost every city owed its development to trade.
　　Yet city dwellers concerned themselves not only with promoting agricultural activities in their own areas, they also collected and processed goods from these areas and distributed them to other cities. From the beginning line and increasingly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, city served as centres of both commerce and simple manufacturing.
　　Apart from the economical functions, the early cities also had important non-economic functions to play. Since libraries, museums, schools and colleges were built and needed people to go there to visit or to study, cities and the large early towns with their concentrations of population tended to serve as centres of educational activities and its policy from which information were spread to the countryside. In addition, the town with people of different occupational, ethnic, racial and religious filiation became focuses of formal and informal organizations which were set up to foster the security and to promote the interests and influence of each group. In these days the pre-industrial city in America functioned as a complex and varied organizing element in American life, not as a simple, homogeneous and sturdy union.
　　The varieties of these early cities were reinforced by the nature of their location and by the process of town spreading. Throughout the pre-industrial period of American history, the city occupied sites on the eastern portion of the then largely under-developed continent, and settlement on the countryside generally followed the expansion of towns in that region. The various interest groups in each city tended to compete with their counterparts in other cities for economic, social and political control first nearby and later more distant and larger areas. And always there remained the underdeveloped regions to be developed through the establishment of new towns by individuals and groups. These individuals and groups sought economic opportunities or looked for a better social, political or religious atmosphere. In this sense, the cities builder had development of succession of urban frontiers. While this kind of circumstance made Americans one of the most prolific and self-conscious city building peoples of their time, it did not resort the steadily urbanizing society in the sense that decade by decade and ever larger proportion of the people lived in cities.
　　In 1690 an estimated 9 to 10 percent of American colonists lived in urban settlements. A century later, that was the end of the 18th century, though 24 places had 2 500 persons or more, city dwellers accounted for only 5.1% of the total population. For the next thirty years, the proportion remained relatively stable and it was not until the 1830 did the urban figure moved back up to the level of 1690.
　　In short, as the number of cities increased after 1690, they sent large number of people into countryside and they retained. Nonetheless the continuous movement of people into and out of the cities made life in the many but relatively small places lively and stimulating.