I cannot give a synthetic overview, but having done work on the 'sanitary revolution' of the late 19th century city, I can point you in the direction of the acerbic and biting review of Frances Trollope, whose travel memoirs of visiting America were widely read and helped shape and reflect international sentiment. Bottom line: Americans were lawless, lax, uncivilized pigs. Her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans just fueled the fire where Europeans saw Americans as merely derivative and imitative of their own elite culture; The New World was doomed to failure in the cultural realm because of the savagery of the frontier conditions surrounding them and their lack of cultural heritage, according to European cultural elites. Hence the frantic American scramble in the 19th century to create 'indigenous' new philosophies (transcendentalism), art forms (Hudson River School of Painting) and even folklore/literature (See especially The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving, including "The Legend of Sleepy Hallow")

Anyway, on to the comedy of Frances Trollope's biting tongue. What a lady. On a steamboat ride up the Mississippi with military 'dignitaries':

I know it is equally easy and invidious to ridicule the peculiarities of appearance and manner in people of a different nation from ourselves; we may, too, at the same moment, be undergoing the same ordeal in their estimation; and, moreover, I am by no means disposed to consider whatever is new to me as therefore objectionable; but, nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel repugnance to many of the novelties that now surrounded me. The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be any thing rather than an hour of enjoyment.

Her review of Cincinnati is one of my favorites, for whatever reason:

We were soon settled in our new dwelling, which looked neat and comfortable enough, but we speedily found that it was devoid of nearly all the accommodation that Europeans conceive necessary to decency and comfort. No pump, no cistern, no drain of any kind, no dustman's cart, or any other visible means of getting rid of the rubbish, which vanishes with such celerity in London, that one has no time to think of its existence; but which accumulated so rapidly at Cincinnati, that I sent for my landlord to know in what manner refuse of all kinds was to be disposed of.

"Your Help will just have to fix them all into the middle of the street, but you must mind, old woman, that it is the middle. I expect you don't know as we have got a law what forbids throwing such things at the sides of the streets; they must just all be cast right into the middle, and the pigs soon takes them off."

In truth the pigs are constantly seen doing Herculean service in this way through every quarter of the city; and though it is not very agreeable to live surrounded by herds of these unsavoury animals, it is well they are so numerous, and so active in their capacity of scavengers, for without them the streets would soon be choked up with all sorts of substances in every stage of decomposition.

Full text at Project Gutenberg; I'd recommend it! http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10345