![]() Agriculture continued to dominate in the South, although the southern states were affected by industrialization as northern textile mills demanded more and more supplies of raw materials. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the growth of industry was concentrated in the Northeast. The task of feeding, clothing, and supplying the rapidly growing population with goods enabled the Industrial Revolution in the United States to reach heights unmatched by any other country. The expansion encouraged immigration as well as westward migration. The dual increases in population and land area provided the United States with a huge internal market for manufactured goods, as well as a large domestic supply of raw materials. The increase in size primarily was a result of the Louisiana Purchase (the acquisition by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 of French-held lands in North America), the Texas war for independence from Mexico (1832–36), and war between the United States and Mexico (1846–48), which together expanded the area of the United States from a few states on the Atlantic coast to vast tracts of land stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean. During the same period, the land area of the United States increased from 891,000 square miles (2,307,690 square kilometers) in 1791 to 3,021,295 square miles (7,825,154 square kilometers) in 1900 (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). The United States: The stage is set for rapid growthĭuring the nineteenth century, the United States grew rapidly, from 5.3 million people in 1800 to 76.2 million in 1900. Whereas everyday life for most people had changed relatively little from 1700 to 1800, it changed profoundly from 1800 to 1900 and beyond. ![]() Taken together, these changes accelerated the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society throughout Europe and North America. A new process of stringing together several inventions to create complex systems revolutionized manufacturing, transportation, and communications, and helped to create new business enterprises that were much larger than anything that had come before. Electricity was developed into a new means of delivering energy, leading to the introduction of small motors as well as superior lighting for both factories and houses. Petroleum became an important source of energy, leading to a new class of mobile machines (notably automobiles and trucks). Advances in science, particularly in chemistry, led to widespread changes, especially in agriculture and medicine. With the rapid spread of the Industrial Revolution from Great Britain to the United States and Europe came a wave of inventions, some of which were new, many of which simply improved upon existing machines. Sometimes called the second Industrial Revolution (or the second phase of the Industrial Revolution), this new phase differed from the original in several ways, and marked an important shift in the progress of the revolution. The practices of using engines as substitutes for animal and human muscle power and of using machines to produce goods took on a different character after about 1850. The Second Phase of the Industrial Revolution: 1850–1940
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