A person living in 1700 or 1800 or even earlier would not have been overwhelmed by the advances made during the previous century. But imagine Washington or Jefferson looking ahead about 100 years to the automobile, light bulb, telephone, cross-country railroads (200,000 miles by 1900), ocean-going streamships, airplanes, skyscrapers, factories full of heavy machinery and thousands of other advances. Although geniuses like Franklin and Jefferson might have foreseen such developments in their imagination, most people in 1800 could hardly conceive of such things. If one surveys the advance of science and technology over the centuries, it is apparent that for long periods the changes in the lives of working people were incremental. Sometimes, in fact, progress tended to reverse itself; the engineering achievements of the Romans, for example, were not replicated for much of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. And a person earning a living and in manufacture or farming in 1800 would not have led a life drastically different from the life of a small tradesmen or farmer a thousand years earlier. As many historians have pointed out, it is impossible to underestimate the impact that the growth of technology had on the lives of ordinary people.The rate of change in human society began to pick up in the early 1800s and has been accelerating ever since. Arguably, even the 20th century did not have such a profound impact on the way people lived their lives as the 19th.

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past.

In an increasingly digital world in which pedagogical trends are de-emphasizing rote learning and professors are increasingly turning toward active-learning exercises, scholars are fleeing traditional textbooks. Yet for those that still yearn for the safe tether of a synthetic text, as either narrative backbone or occasional reference material, The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. Unchecked by profit motives or business models, and free from for-profit educational organizations, The American Yawp is by scholars, for scholars. All contributors—experienced college-level instructors—volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms.

The transition from an agricultural to an INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY took more than a century in the United States, but that long development entered its first phase from the 1790s through the 1830s. The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION had begun in Britain during the mid-18th century, but the American colonies lagged far behind the mother country in part because the abundance of land and scarcity of labor in the New World reduced interest in expensive investments in machine production. Nevertheless, with the shift from hand-made to machine-made products a new era of human experience began where increased productivity created a much higher standard of living than had ever been known in the pre-industrial world.

When we look closely at the South's railroad network, the South's experimentation with and investment in railroads and other technologies, it turns out, was consistent with the rest of the nation. In both regions railroads grew fastest in the new western border regions. And in both railroad development had leapfrogged over the mountain regions, leaving big gaps in some areas, such as Pennsylvania, middle Georgia, and western Virginia.

By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following:

Define global climate change
Summarize the effects of the Industrial Revolution on global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration
Describe three natural factors affecting long-term global climate
List two or more greenhouse gases and describe their role in the greenhouse effect

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Explain the conditions that have allowed for modern economic growth in the last two centuries
Analyze the influence of public policies on an economy's long-run economic growth

Contains 623 maps chosen from more than 3,000 railroad maps and about 2,000 regional, state, and county maps, and other maps which show "internal improvements" of the past century. The maps presented here are a selection from the Geography and Map Division holdings, based on the popular cartobibliography, Railroad Maps of the United States: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Original 19th-century Maps in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, compiled by Andrew M. Modelski (Washington: Library of Congress, 1975). This annotated list reveals the scope of the railroad map collection and highlights the development of railroad mapping in 19th-century America.

The Railroad maps represent an important historical record, illustrating the growth of travel and settlement as well as the development of industry and agriculture in the United States. They depict the development of cartographic style and technique, highlighting the achievement of early railroaders. Included in the collection are progress report surveys for individual lines, official government surveys, promotional maps, maps showing land grants and rights-of-way, and route guides published by commercial firms.

Southern railroad mileage outpaced Northern mileage in the 1850s. Virginia and Tennessee built more miles of railroad in the decade than the six state region of New England. Florida went from 21 miles of rail to 402, a 1,814 % increase. Historians have downplayed the effects of southern railroad development in these years. Richard Brown in The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (Hill and Wang, 1976) argued that southern rails were built cheaply "to bring cotton to market" and nothing more. Other historians have followed this line of argument. Scott Reynolds Nelson in Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) also considered Southern railroads limited, one-dimensional, and ineffectual before the Civil War.

For every state there was a saturation point, a point of diminishing returns, in the development of railroad mileage and access to the network. Here too, the pattern of Southern development was impressive and consequential. Beyond a certain point each mile of railroad added to a network included an increasingly small percentage of the population.

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Early Industrialization in the Northeast
A Vibrant Capitalist Republic
On the Move: The Transportation Revolution
A New Social Order: Class Divisions