Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900, 2nd Edition

Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets.

Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 is a narrative-based social history that is ideal for college and high school students researching this era. Thematically organized chapters, devoted to Economic Life, Domestic Life, Recreational Life, and other themes, are broad in scope but include primary documents and telling details that give readers a visceral sense of the lives of people who lived during the era of industrialization.

Primary documents range from first-person diaries of individuals who lived during the era, to letters from freed slaves looking to reunite with relatives sold away from them, to speeches and essays by activists including Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams. They reveal how people understood the goals of education, the legal position of African Americans in the South, and marriage, among many other daily phenomena. Readers will become privy to a range of personal experiences while comprehending the importance of the economic and social developments of the period. A chronology, a glossary, a selection of illustrations, and further reading sources complete the work.

• Provides an overview of the dramatic economic changes occurring in the United States during industrialization, especially in the textile, meatpacking, steel, and railroad industries
• Describes a political culture marked by high participation rates in the North, active suppression of the African American vote in the South, and a youth culture that made voting an important male rite of passage
• Offers primary documents that invite readers to consider contrasting positions on a variety of issues, including how white supremacists justified violence and suppression of the black vote and how African American activists spoke out to resist this
• Explores a variety of educational models, including manual education, Montessori education, and single-sex education, that resonate with contemporary debates on education