Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Industrial Revolution
New England industrialists hired thousands of young farm girls to work together in early textile mills—and spawned a host of unintended consequences.
In June 1833, President Andrew Jackson, visiting the brand-new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, watched as 2500 female mill workers marched past the balcony of his hotel.
1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement.
2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known
In 1800, the United States was an underdeveloped nation of just over five million people. It was a society shaped by immigration, but immigrants from one country, Great Britain, made up around half the population.
Its waters drove our first Industrial Revolution, and were poisoned by it. Henry David Thoreau believed that the Merrimack might not run pure again for thousands of years, but today, it is a welcoming pathway through a hundred-mile-long red-brick museum of America’s rise to power.
The birth of the global village
Oliver Evans did not live to see railroads. He died in 1819, and the first real American railroad line, the Baltimore & Ohio, was begun only in 1828.
On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol.
In 1820, their daily existence was practically medieval; 30 later, many of them were living the modern life.
It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans.
For a hundred years now ,Americans have been reading as comedy Mark Twain’s dark indictment of chivalry, technology, and all of humanity.
After a full century in print, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court remains one of the queerer and more disturbing exercises of the American literary imagination, a brilliant comic fantasy that turns savage and shakes
One man measures his life-span against the length of recorded history and finds tidings of comfort and hope
At the risk of being sneered at as a NeoVictorian, I hereby admit to a nineteenth-century belief that, allowing for daily relapses Land hourly alarms, the world of man is improving.
The third in a series on TIMES OF TRIAL IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT
Old Hickory's attack on Biddle's bank had some unexpected consequences
Editor's Note: Bray Hammond wrote this essay for American Heritage in 1956 and developed it into Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1958.
Featured Authors
