¦ Gentility and the Consumer Revolution
¦ Birth of the Factory
¦ An Industrial Proletariat?
¦ Lowell's Waltham System: Women as Factory Workers
¦ Irish and German Immigrants
¦ The Persistence of the Household System
¦ Rise of Corporations
¦ Cotton Revolutionizes the South
¦ Revival of Slavery
¦ Roads to Market
¦ Transportation and the Government
¦ Development of Steamboats
¦ The Canal Boom
¦ New York City: Emporium of the Western World
¦ The Marshall Court
¦ Mapping the Past:
The Making of the Working Class
¦ Debating the Past:
Was There a "Market Revolution" in the Early 1800s?
((••-[Hear the Audio Chapter 8 at Www. myhistorylab. com
¦ A view of Samuel Slater's cotton textile mill at Pawtucket Falls in Rhode Island; the fast-running water turned the wheels that powered the machinery.
But by the early 1800s the "Age of Homespun" was waning. Manufactured products, often produced in distant factories, increasingly supplanted home-made goods. Slater's mill, pictured on page 228, was among the first such factories. Historians still debate whether the shift from rural self-sufficiency to a specialized market economy occurred over a few pivotal decades during the early 1800s or whether it evolved slowly, over a longer period of time.
Nearly all agree, though, that after 1810 a cluster of changes imparted a new dynamism to the American economy: the growing demand for high-quality, store-bought goods; the rise of the factory system; the recruitment and training of a cheap labor force; the emergence of corporations; the revival of the Southern economy based on slavery and cotton production; the development of improved transportation that facilitated the exchange of farm and factory goods; and the creation of legal structures that promoted economic growth.
By the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans had been contributors to and consumers of an economic system that, while not yet fully global, had become national in scope. Most Americans wore socks that were manufactured in a handful of cities in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Thus while political tendencies tended to pull the nation apart, especially the growing dispute over the future of slavery in the territories, Americans were becoming more interdependent economically. ¦
Americans enshrined the simple life and a homespun equality; yet they coveted the cultural markers of aristocracy, such as imported porcelain tea services. This one, made in France, was given to Alexander Hamilton. Gentility spread, historian Richard Bushman writes, "because people longed to be associated with the 'best society.'”
World History
