What was an aspect of the market revolution

People generally move to and live where they can find work and support their families. Throughout the 19 th century an increasing number of people were leaving farms and moving to cities and gaining employment in factories. Supporting the textile industry, the Lowell Mills in Massachusetts became a prime example of factory job opportunities attracting young adults to leave the farm and come work for wages.

As more and more factories opened up across the Northeast and Mid-west, many young workers left the farms to move to the cities and pursue their own careers. Even interior cities grew in population as trade and transportation centers. Along river based trade routes, cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St.

Louis grew as major distribution centers. As the 19 th century moved on, more and more of the population found their way to the cities and by As the 19 th century moved on, more and more of the population found their way to the cities and by more people were living in cities than rural areas for the first time in American history.

As the changing Market Economy demanded a greater number of factory workers, many women took the opportunity to go to work and earn money. Many young girls left the isolation of the farm for the excitement and opportunity to move to the city and get a job. The early part of the 19 th century brought a series of reform movements, many due to the religious influence of the 2 nd Great Awakening, such as temperance, female suffrage, abolition, and prison reforms. This active participation in political and social life challenged the clear patriarchal hierarchy that had dominated the country up until this point.

As factory wages became the primary source of income the home also became a refuge from the hard labor of the day. Separate spheres began to develop. The home or domestic sphere, where men still expected women to monitor and maintain became a battle ground over traditional gender roles and new social positions on female equality.

As some women fought against being pushed into the sphere of domesticity, others fought for greater access to political and educational opportunities, oftentimes against their own husbands who were hesitant to relinquish too much control. As some women fought against being pushed into the sphere of domesticity, others fought for greater access to political and educational opportunities. The battle between the rich and poor escalated all over the country as the divide between the haves and the have nots became more obvious.

Employers tried to keep and enforce more and more control over their workers, but the workers were not going to be denied. Women workers went on strike due to wages being cut as textile prices continue to decline due to production exceeded demand. And in this video I wanna start out by talking about The Industrial Revolution. OK, so what was The Industrial Revolution? This was, broadly speaking, a revolution in the kinds of machinery that people used to make finished goods.

Now, if you think about the early republic in the United States you often think of kind of an agrarian society; and that was how Thomas Jefferson, the author of The Declaration of Independence, really imagined the United States, as a nation of small farmers.

But Thomas Jefferson didn't necessarily see all of these revolutions in industry coming. He couldn't anticipate that; and so, in the s, early s, a bunch of new inventions came to the United States that completely revolutionized how things were made.

So in this time period the United States kinda slowly begins its transformation from being a nation of farmers to a nation of people who worked for wages, by the hour, and then used the money that they made from that hourly labor to buy the things that they need.

So how did this happen? One event that historians often point to is the introduction of the textile mill to the United States. So this fellow here, his name is Samuel Slater, and Samuel Slater was an Englishman who worked in a textile mill. And remember that the United Kingdom was the world's capital of textile production in this time.

And they were so jealous of their position as the world's leading textile producer that they even made it illegal to export the plans for a textile mill. Samuel Slater decided that even if it was illegal to export actual plans, it wasn't necessarily illegal to export his brain, so he decided to memorize how these textile looms worked; and this is powered by a water wheel.

And then he actually got in disguise, put himself on a ship, and came to Rhode Island to set up a textile mill. In fact, people were so angry that he did this that in his home town he's actually known as Slater the Traitor. So what was new about this?

Well, I think the water-wheel aspect is really one of the key innovations here. So instead of being powered by humans or perhaps being powered by animals, now American machinery can be powered by an outside source: so water or steam; and that means that these mills and factories later are going to kinda congregate around sources of power, like rivers for example.

So if you've ever wondered why so many American cities are next to rivers, it's usually because they needed them to power mills. So starting in the s, and really into the early 19th Century, there's this slow transformation toward factory labor. And you can see in this image here that a lot of the people actually laboring in these factories were women because young men kind of had a pretty good path forward in life at this time period.

They could be farmers, like their fathers; maybe they could learn a trade. But for young women there wasn't necessarily a form of income outside the house, and so a man named Charles Lowell decided to set up a whole series of textile mills in what will be called Lowell, Massachusetts.

It's just outside of Boston. And then he primarily employed young women to work in these textile mills. Think partly because young women were associated with working with fabric; women frequently did the spinning and the sewing in the household; but also because women you could probably pay a little bit less than young men for the same kind of labor.

So this is kind of a very slow revolution toward individual work. Because as a nation of farmers, most people would have worked in a family unit.

So people are no longer able to set the pace of their own lives by and large. And with things like interchangeable parts, for example, fewer and fewer artisans, so masters of a craft, are making goods from start to finish.

So it used to be perhaps you would be a master shoemaker, a master cobbler, and you would make every part of that shoe from tanning the leather to nailing in the sole. The system of interchangeable parts, which will later become even more codified as the assembly-line system, means that most people are only doing one part of a task. So instead of doing all of making a shoe and saying at the end of it, "I made this shoe, "I am a master maker of shoes," now your entire job might just be to hammer in one nail and then hand off the shoe to the next person.

So there's never anything that you can point to and say, "I made that. But what's even more important about this process of interchangeable parts, assembly-line labor, is that it leads to an overall, what they call, deskilling. So removing the skill from labor. And what's important about that is that if you've broken down a task into enough small parts that you've got people literally hammering in the same nail on a different shoe 12 hours a day, then you don't necessarily need highly trained artisans to do that.

And what happens if you are not highly trained, we'll call this unskilled labor, and you decide you want to strike for higher pay? Well, your boss doesn't need to train anyone to hammer in that nail so you'll just get fired. So it makes the labor force in general a little bit more precarious because you don't need an exceptional skill to have a factory job, but you are easily replaced.

All right, let's talk about entry into a market system. Now what do I mean by this? In this time period, the United States develops what's called a market economy. And that's different from what most people had been doing up until that point because people in the United States had mainly shipped raw materials over to Europe, England particularly, to be processed and made into finished goods.

And this is similar to the system of mercantilism that you might be familiar with from the colonial era. Well, the war of and some of the conflict leading up to it, led the United States to embargo England, which was a manufacturing center. So people couldn't send their raw materials there. They responded by investing in their own factories.

So the war of is actually a pretty important moment for the development of domestic industrialization at home. So this gives people an opportunity to invest and to speculate. And that means that as they're a part of an international market of investment speculation, they're prone to the kinds of booms and busts that characterize capitalism, right?

Now we often think of the Great Depression as having been the first major American depression. But really, it was the largest and most recent up until that point, because after the war of , the United States kinda goes through approximately a year cycle of boom and bust. So boom is when things are getting better, things are looking up, the economy is going really well, and then a bubble of some kind bursts. And in , they had the very first of these bubbles burst, it's called the Panic of in land speculation.

And this is the first time that the United States had actually experienced any kind of economic depression. So imagine how frightening that would have been to them.