Word: urban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Total enrollment in U.S. public schools rose only 4.2% between 1986 and 1991, according to a 1993 Urban Institute study, while the number of students with little or no knowledge of English increased 50%, from 1.5 million to 2.3 million...
African clothing, filtered through rap culture, influences fashion as well. The L.A.-based firm Threads for Life (also known as Cross Colours) sells hip- hop fashion inspired by urban youth and African designers, such as overalls with colorful kente-cloth patches. "It becomes not just a pair of jeans, but something that means something," says firm co-owner Carl Jones. Company sales rose from $15 million in 1991 to $89 million...
...touring show Griot New York features sets by noted sculptor Martin Puryear and music by trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. Employing a multiethnic troupe, Griot seeks to capture the drama of immigration. Says Fagan: "It's a celebration of New York City, of West Indians, Indians and Africans, of big urban metropolises that are always being dumped on." Fagan also wrote a poem to illustrate the show's theme of diverse peoples traveling difficult routes to come together in one nation...
...Irish had a gift for mutual self-help and taking care of their own. Out of this instinct, manifest in America's dozens of "little Dublins," emerged institutions, like New York City's notorious Tammany Hall, that would transform the quality and character of urban politics in America. As early as 1852, the immigrant vote (principally Irish) was so important that Winfield Scott, the staunchly Protestant Whig candidate for President, ecumenically attended Sunday Mass on campaign visits to New York. Some 210,000 Irish fought during the Civil War, 170,000 of them on the Union side...
...mostly peasants, but they faced a different and unhappy prospect. The great era of frontier settlement was coming to an end. After being processed at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay and other immigration centers, millions of these rural folk found themselves confined to the mean streets of urban ghettos like Manhattan's , festering Lower East Side, working at menial jobs and crammed into narrow railroad flats that lacked both heat and privacy...