America and the Industrial Revolution

Paper Summary:

The Industrial Revolution turned America from a primarily agrarian nation where the ownership and harvesting of crops on rich soil made early pioneers wealthy. The paper shows that the age of the machine turned small towns into metropolitan areas, as more and more people from the countryside and especially from Europe moved to these newly formed metropolises in order to find work. While inventors were creating manufacturing, communication and transportation innovations, tenements and slums sprang up. The paper shows that in just a few short years, America, which had seen land as the most precious commodity, now became a capitalist nation.

From the Paper:

"As industrialization deprived some workers of their skills and replaced them with machinery, the workers had only one way to fight back: the formation of unions. The goal of such unions went well beyond wages. They were concerned with the enormous number of deaths and injuries, the pressure exerted on workers to work long hours without overtime pay, and many unfair anti-labor decisions in the courts. So, the ultimate weapon was developed: strikes. "The largest of these was the nationwide strike of railroad workers that began in 1894 against the Pullman company in Chicago" (Zinn 77)".

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