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US history
Course: US history > Unit 4
Lesson 1: Politics and society in the early nineteenth century- The election of 1800
- Jefferson's presidency and the turn of the nineteenth century
- The Louisiana Purchase and its exploration
- Jefferson's election and presidency
- The War of 1812
- The War of 1812
- The Monroe Doctrine
- The presidency of John Quincy Adams
- Politics and regional interests
- The Market Revolution - textile mills and the cotton gin
- The Market Revolution - communication and transportation
- The Market Revolution - impact and significance
- Irish and German immigration
- The 1820s and the Market Revolution
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The Market Revolution - communication and transportation
The Market Revolution transformed American business in the 19th century. New technologies like the textile mill and cotton gin changed work and commodities. Innovations in transportation, like railroads, steamships, and canals, and communication, like the telegraph, expanded and sped up business. This led to a reorganization of American society.
Want to join the conversation?
- Were steam ships also a key reason why immigration to the U.S. increased in the 1800s?(17 votes)
- I wouldn't say it was a key reason but it would have helped. Most of the reasons people came to the USA was because there was more opportunity than the other countries at the time. There was also the Irish Potato famine that made most of the Irish population at the time move to the USA. They thought the country wasn't going to bounce back anytime soon and America was thriving.(22 votes)
- Hey!, why would they be giving out blueprints for such a profitable machine and expect no backstabbing, I mean wow there's gotta be some smart dudes running this business.(7 votes)
- Well it wouldn't be smart to back stab a government. Plus, the inventor if they kept their invention inside the country and the country is holding it so close. It would be a major win for the inventor as he wouldn't need to protect his own product from foreign competitors.The only reason Slater left was because he was young, I would think he thought he had nothing to lose, and that he knew how interested America would be in the product.(17 votes)
- Why did steamships improve the American lifestyle?(4 votes)
- It allowed for faster and easier transportation, so people could move around faster, and also get access to goods easier as well.(7 votes)
- how did the market of revolution help the farmers(3 votes)
- Great question! People may argue about whether it helped or not, but one way it helped them was because the farmers had a bigger range to sell their crops; so they would get more business and money!
This question intrigued me, so I will study this more. Thank you for asking this question!(7 votes)
- Did the morse code help with the blind?(3 votes)
- Yes. It turned information communicated for eyes (letters) into communication communicated for ears (sounds). That helped people whose eyes did not function well.(6 votes)
- My ancestors moved from Ashfield Massachusetts to French Creek West Virginia (then Virginia) in 1811. It took them 70 days in an ox-cart caravan-Today an 8-10 hour drive.(4 votes)
- ish. The B&O was THE first American railroad, was it not? 4:59(3 votes)
- Yes it was the first railroad which began operating in 1827(2 votes)
- how did the steamship affect the American economy?(2 votes)
- The steamboat greatly reduced the amount of time it took to ship items. Where a sailing ship might have taken a week to travel a distance, the steam boat made the same trip in a day or two.
This increase in the speed of shipping allowed for perishable goods to be shipped with less spoilage upon arrival and opened up new markets for crops. When those new markets opened, that meant more money for the farmers who then could purchase and invest in things that were more local - thus improving the local economy as well.
The steam boat was also able to travel upstream on rivers whereas sailing ships tended to be limited to downstream voyages.(4 votes)
- If the B.O. railroad was a real thing, are all the railroads/streets in Monopoly based on real things?(2 votes)
- The game Monopoly has different street names in different nations. The ones in the American version are based on the map of Atlantic City, New Jersey. All of the railroads in the American game were running trains into or through Atlantic City at the time the game was published in the USA.(3 votes)
- why do historians say the market revolution was more revolutionary then the american revolution ?(3 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] So we
have been talking about the Market Revolution in the United States which was this period in the first half of the 19th century where the way that Americans
did business really changed. And it changed in a number of ways, so the kinds of work
that people did changed and the people they sold
their goods to changed in the form of new markets. And even the kinds of commodities that they were producing. All of these were
altered in the first half of the 19th century, thanks to a couple of simultaneous trends. The Industrial Revolution
in which new technologies were developed to make
production more efficient and revolutions in
transportation and communication, which made it easier
to get goods and people to far distances more quickly and to communicate over
considerable distances more quickly. And these really resulted
in a reorganization of American society that some historians have actually said was more revolutionary than
the American Revolution. So in the last video, we discussed some of the new technologies which changed American work
in the early 19th century. One of these was the
introduction of the textile mill, which was powered by a water wheel, by Samuel Slater, which helped textile mills
become the chief industry of New England, also helped women start
working outside the home in the Lowell Mills,
started by Charles Lowell and also began the system
by which factory owners would hire individuals,
rather than family units, to work for wages in their factories. The other major invention that
had a really important impact on American society was the cotton gin, which was a machine that
separated cotton seeds from the fiber and it made
the production of cotton considerably more profitable. And so, with cotton a profitable crop, the American south
really invested in cotton and investing in cotton
as its main cash crop meant they really entrenched
the system of slavery. So even though in the 1780s, early 1790s, many southern states were thinking perhaps they'd abolish slavery because
the institution was not overly profitable, as cotton became the
cash crop of the south, the institution of slavery
would be entrenched and continue to grow until the 1860s. So those are some of the new
technologies of production. In this video, I wanna spend
some time talking about the revolution in communication
and transportation that happened also in this time period. So just like inventions
like the textile mill or the cotton gin made
it easier to work faster, inventions in transportation
and communication in the early 19th century
also made it possible to transport goods faster and to transport information faster. So I wanna talk about just a few of these transportation inventions. One of these was the railroad. Now, the railroad was not
invented in the United States. Rather, the United States
imported the railroad technology from England and Germany and this is one of the
very first railroads in the United States, I think it's kind of adorable 'cause you can see how it still is really owing a debt, stylistically, to a wagon. Even looks like a wagon here on the end. So railroads begin to come
into the United States in the early 1800s and first
they're mostly for cargo or helping to move stone, things to help build canals, which we'll get to in a second. But soon they're also
passenger rail stations. And the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, or B&O railroad, which you may know from
your Monopoly board was one of the first passenger rail lines in the United States. Another major transportation revolution of this time period was shipping on water. So, in 1807, inventor Robert Fulton came up with the steamship and so a steamship, and you can see the little
smokestacks right here, makes it much easier to power the ship and one thing you can do
then is go against the tide of a river, so instead of just, for example, going down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans, you can also go back up
the Mississippi River which means commerce can go
more easily in both directions. Another major innovation of
the time period are canals. And this here is a map of the Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825 and a canal is a relatively narrow, relatively shallow waterway but it still allows cargo
barges to move across what otherwise would be really
hard to navigate territory, so, you know, it's hard to see here, but there are mountains here, right. So, now you can take cargo across mountains, across large stretches of land by ship, which is much faster than trying to do it on foot or with a wagon. I think it's actually hard
for us to imagine now, but in the early 19th century and really for most of time before then, waterways were the highways of the world. It was a lot easier to
get from Boston to London across the Atlantic by ship than it would have been to get from Boston to the Appalachian Mountains on foot. Before the invention of air travel, before the Interstate Highway System, and really, up until the
invention of the railroad, waterways were the
easiest way to get around in the world. And the last communication revolution that I wanna talk about is the
invention of the telegraph, which a portrait painter-turned-inventor named Samuel Morse first patented in 1844 and Morse invented Morse Code because the telegraph worked by sending pulses down copper wires and so it made it easy to communicate through coded messages of dots and dashes. So, dots and dashes
corresponded with letters which allowed you to send messages over extremely long distances, so you could send a message by telegraph in an instant, as opposed to sending a letter, which might take days or even weeks to get to its destination. So, all of these revolutions
in transportation and communication kind of translate into two major transformations
in American business at this time period. One, is that the scope of business that you
can do is much greater because now, if you're
a farmer who lives in, say, Rochester, your radius of... your radius of people you
can sell your produce to before it goes bad is considerably larger. Now, instead of just being able to get to where you can get maybe in
a wagon's trip of a day, you can send your crops on the Erie Canal and suddenly, you're dealing
with a much larger market. So, they're not only creating
a national web of commerce, they're also creating an
international web of commerce because these canals and steamships go to international ports which mean that you can now do business from
the western part of New York with people who live in London. And the other thing that increases here is the pace of business, right, so instead of having
to negotiate a business deal through a series of letters, which might take you many weeks, now you can negotiate a business deal by the telegraph and it's only gonna take
you a couple of days. Likewise, it might have taken you weeks to send your logs for example, down the Mississippi River. Now you have them in a steamship and it takes just a couple of days. So there's an overall expansion in the number of people who
can participate in markets. The expansion of the distance at which you can participate in a market and the pace at which you can do it. You can do business much faster with these revolutions in transportation and communication. And in the next video, I'll talk more about how
these transformations in technology and the scope and pace of
American business affected the society of the United States in the early 19th century.