Background
Wade was born in Des Moines but grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, where his father practiced law.
Wade was born in Des Moines but grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, where his father practiced law.
He attended New Trier High School there, where he played championship-level tennis.
As a historian, he pioneered the interdisciplinary application of social science techniques to the study of urban history and helped make cities an important academic subject. His first book The Urban Frontier (1959) was a challenge to Frederick Jackson Turner"s Frontier thesis, asserting that the catalysts for western expansion were the Western cities like Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, not the pioneer farmers. Wade earned bachelor"s and master"s degrees in history at the University of Rochester and also competed in basketball, track and field and baseball.
After receiving his doctorate at Harvard University in 1956, Wade taught at Rochester and at Washington University in Saint Louis before moving to the University of Chicago in 1963.
In 1971 Wade was named a distinguished professor of history at City University of New York"s Graduate Center. In 1991 Wade was appointed chairman of New York State"s Commission on Libraries by Government.
Mario M. Cuomo. "He started a movement," said his former student Kenneth T. Jackson.
The only reason I took urban history was because of him. I had never heard of such a thing." He moved easily in the higher circles of Democratic Party politics.
In 1974-1975 Wade was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His marriages to Louise Carroll Wade of Eugene, Oregon, and Cynthia Hyla Whittaker of Manhattan, New York ended in divorce.
He died at his home in Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, New New York
In The Urban Frontier, Wade summarized the claims that scholars had made for the importance of the city in American history. The cities were the focal points for the growth of the West, especially those along the Ohio River and Mississippi River. The cities, especially Boston were the seedbeds of the American Revolution.
The rivalry between cities, such as between Baltimore and Philadelphia, or between Chicago and Saint Louis, stimulated economic innovations and growth, especially regarding the railroads. The failure of the South to develop an urban infrastructure significantly weakened it during the American Civil War, especially after its border cities of Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, and Saint Louis refused to join the Confederacy. The cities were fonts of innovation in democracy, especially in terms of building powerful political organizations and machines.
They were also the main base for reformers of what those machines built, becoming the home base for important immigrant groups, especially the Irish and the Jews. Cities were the strongholds of labor unions in the 19th and 20th centuries (although no longer true in the 21st century). See Richard Wade, "The City in History: Some American Perspectives," in Werner Z. Hirsch, educated, Urban and Form (1963) pp.