Chapter 9: Vocab + Reading Questions Flashcards
Industrial Revolution
A burst of major inventions and economic expansion based on water and steam power and the use of machine technology that transformed certain industries, such as cotton textiles and iron, between 1790 and 1860.
Division of Labor
A system of manufacture that divides production into a series of distinct and repetitive tasks performed by machines or workers.
Mineral-Based Economy
An economy based on coal and metal that began to emerge in the 1830s, as manufacturers increasingly ran machinery fashioned from metal with coal-burning stationary steam engines rather than with water power.
Mechanics
A term used in the nineteenth century to refer to skilled craftsmen and inventors who built and improved machinery and machine tools for the industry.
Waltham-Lowell System
A system of labor using young women recruited from farm families to work in factories in Lowell, Chicopee, and other sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The women lived in company boarding houses with strict rules and curfews and were often required to attend church.
Machine Tools
Cutting, boring, and drilling machines used to produce standardized metal parts, which were then assembled into products such as textile looms and sewing machines. The rapid development of machine tools by American inventors in the early nineteenth century was a factor in the rapid spread of industrialization.
Artisan Republicanism
An ideology that celebrated small-scale producers, men and women who owned their own shops (or farms). It defined the ideal republican society as one constituted by, and dedicated to the welfare of, independent workers and citizens.
Unions
Organizations of workers that began during the Industrial Revolution to bargain with employers over wages, hours, benefits, and control of the workplace.
Labor Theory of Value
The belief that human labor produces economic value. Adherents argued that the price of a product should be determined not by the market (supply and demand) but by the amount of work required to make it, and that most of the price should be paid to the person who produced it.
Market Revolution
The dramatic increase between 1820 and 1850 in the exchange of goods and services in market transactions. The Market Revolution reflected the increased output of farms and factories, the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants, and the creation of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads.
Erie Canal
A 364-mile waterway connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The Erie Canal brought prosperity to the entire Great Lakes region, and its benefits prompted civic and business leaders in Philadelphia and Baltimore to propose canals to link their cities to the Midwest.
Middle Class
An economic group of prosperous farmers, artisans, and trader that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Its rise reflected a dramatic increase in prosperity. This surge in income, along with an abundance of inexpensive mass-produced goods, fostered a distinct middle-class urban culture.
Self-Made Man
A nineteenth-century ideal that celebrated men who rose to wealth or social prominence from humble origins through self-discipline, hard work, and temperate habits.
Benevolent Empire
A broad-ranging campaign of moral and institutional reforms inspired by evangelical Christian ideals and endorsed by upper-middle-class men and women in the 1820s and 1830s.
American Temperance Society
A society invigorated by evangelical Protestants in 1832 that set out to curb the consumption of alcoholic beverages.
