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Influence & Impact of the Industrial Revolution

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.

The relative ease with which new wealth could be created, not just in agriculture and commerce as before, but now also in manufacturing, transportation and finance, brought profound consequences for human society. Primarily, it was a pursuit of riches: "There may be here and there an individual, who does not spend his heart in laboring for riches; but there is nothing approaching to a class of persons actuated by any other desire." (Gordon 116). The newly affluent, with affordable l...

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Influence & Impact of the Industrial Revolution. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:41, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1684131.html