Home and Market

• More products• Greater variety• Greater amount• Beginning of mass production• Decline of home production

Growth of Trade

• Growing wheat, corn• Steel plow invented by Cyrus McCormick• Credit• Feeding eastern cities• Eastern farmers focus on dairy, fruits, veggies

Commercial Agriculture

• Urbanization• Greater interconnectedness (canals, railroads)

Westward migration – “Manifest Destiny” (1845)

– Craftsmen lose autonomy– Work split up into smaller tasks– Interchangeable parts– Clocks, guns, tools, shoes, etc.– Mechanization– British technology stolen

Factory System

– Most from Ireland, Germany– Most went to the North– Only Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis got

many immigrants

Immigration

– Why?• Peasants pushed off land• Industrialization costs craft jobs• Steamship, railroad make travel easier

The Marketplace

• New• Atomistic• Anonymous• Disorder• Anxiety for churches and families

Individualism

• Free labor – Your labor is your property– Sell it on the market

• “Self-made man”• Possessive individualism

New Gender Roles

• Public vs. private sphere• Public=men• Private=women, domestic, family

Rise of the Middle Class

• Some young women work in factories• Home for nurturing children• Not site of production

Cult of Domesticity

– Women have control over their “sphere”– New emphasis on women’s role with kids

Self-improvement

– Manners books– Temperance societies– Idea of bourgeois respectability

2nd Great Awakening

• 1820s-1850s?• Series of revivals• “burned over district” in upstate NY

2nd Great Awakening

• Americans look for redemption• Old ways under threat• Patriarchy• New ideas, new ways of living