Urban history

Summary

Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The historiographical approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.