Home and Market
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Transcript of Home and Market
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