Pensacola, Florida: A Military City in the New South

When Henry Grady extolled the emergence of the “New South,” he was primarily referring to the advent of an urban industrial civilization in that region; his conception of the “New South” did not foresee the possibility that urbanism in many southern communities would occur without industrialization. While urban history is more than a bookshelf of analyses of individual cities, localized studies of the widely divergent types of cities that make up the “New South“ in the twentieth century would enrich our knowledge of the concept. Pensacola, Florida, emerged as a city in the “New South“ in the period 1900 to 1945. This is evident from a marked population increase, as well as the manifestation of typical urban attitudes and social problems. Between 1900 and 1945 Pensacola evolved from a provincial city (17,747) with low mobility for its citizens, defined community and family sanctions, and close neighborhood association, to a metropolitan city of 80,000, with patent heterogeneity, population turnover, and problems of social disorder. Pensacola’s urbanization reflects the effects of a military rather than industrial-based local economy