Influence & Impact of the Industrial Revolution
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It is commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. It required the industrial revolution, however, to shatter a timeless pattern of everyday life and create today's values and ways of living that are only minimally comparable with those of the nineteenth century. By modern standards, most nineteenth century people, including those who lived on farms, led lives that were astonishingly backward, dirty and impoverished. Initially, the changes caused by the Industrial Revolution were hard to discern and affected people only indirectly. However, beginning in the urban areas in the 1820's and spreading out to the countryside, a series of developments changed people's ordinary lives in a single generation. The railroad, good interior lighting, running water, central heating, cookstoves, iceboxes, the telegraph, and mass circulation newspapers all arrived within thirty years, and a rapidly expanding middle class came to dominate American society.For most people of that era, these transformations were exhilarating and disturbing: exhilarating because the quality of everyday life had substantially improved; and disturbing because the landmarks and rules of the old society vanished and a new, exceedingly complex moral, economic, social and political universe had emerged. As with every major technological advance of the industrial era, there were those who saw the imminent collapse of Western civilization.
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placing them next to today's, it may be useful to define value: "A value is something we find fulfilling, rewarding and important . . . therefore we treasure it, protect it, seek it, and structure our lives around it." (Pipperi 4). Values, the loftiest of our ideals, are generally established at school or at home, by social standards or by individual beliefs, and stem from specific roots, which include religion, law and customs- the consensus of all beliefs in a society. At the end of the nineteenth century, a shift in moral values occurred.
Replacing the Victorian morality of self-control and a defensive maintenance-oriented strategy toward psychic and physical health, the shift involved a loosening of the work ethic. Various forms of entertainment promised temporary escapes to a realm of intense experience, far from the unreality of Victorian repression. To a generation suffering from identity diffusion and inner emptiness, the new reality offered harmony, vitality, and the hope of self-realization. The paths to self-realization included: one through the careful management of personal resources; and another through intense experience. These paths were united by certain assumptions: "an implicit nostalgia for the vigorous hea
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Approximate Word count = 2326
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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