Life and Culture
American frontier life was often plagued by poverty and illness.
Frontier life was especially difficult for women.
As late as 1850, over one-half of the American population was under the age of thirty.
Americans came to look on their spectacular western wilderness areas especially as one of the things that defined and distinguished America as a new nation.
A major change affecting the American family in the early nineteenth century was a decline in the average number of children per household.
Industrialization produced a larger gap between the rich and the poor.

Economy
The majority of early American manufacturing was in the North.
The principle of "general incorporation" permitted individual businesspeople to apply for limited-liability corporate charters from the state legislatures.
In the sectional division of labor that had developed before the Civil War, the South generally provided raw materials to the Northeast in exchange for manufactured goods, transportation, and commercial services.
America's economy provided more opportunity to ordinary workers than existed in the contemporary societies of Europe.
Pre-Civil War, fur-trapping was the primary economic activity in the Rocky Mountain West.
Industrialization was at first slow to arrive in America because there was a shortage of labor, capital, and consumers.
Wages for most American workers rose in the early nineteenth century, except for the most exploited workers like women and children.
The South specialized in cotton, the West in grain and livestock, and the East in manufacturing.
The steamship was the most effective long-term solution to trans-oceanic shipping and travel.
'Limited liability,' a principal that permitted individual investors to risk no more capital in a business venture than their own share of a corporation's stock, was developed.
Children were a common source of early factory labor, often underpaid, whipped, and brutally beaten.

Labor Unions
Early labor unions had very slow progress, this was partly because striking was both illegal and ineffective.
They were working people's organizations, often considered illegal under early American law.

Innovations
The steel plow and mechanical reaper greatly advanced America, agriculturally.
Farmers were brought from subsistence farmers to commercial farmers with a market-oriented agriculture.
The Erie Canal created strong east-west commercial and industrial links between the Northeast and the West. AKA "Clinton's Big Ditch"; completed in 1825.
The railroad had slow acceptance as a more efficient and flexible alternative to waterbound transportation.
The advances in manufacturing and transportation increased the gap between rich and poor.
George Catlin, an American painter, developed the idea for a national park system.
Textiles was the first industry to be shaped by the new factory system of manufacturing.
Steamboats and canals were the first major improvements in the American transportation system.
Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin in 1793 which enhanced cotton production and gave new life to black slavery.
Telegraphs, invented by Samuel F.B. Morse, provided insta-communication across large distances. The first telegraph message--"What hath God wrought?"--was sent from Baltimore to Washington in 1844. Telegraph lines were stretched across the Atlantic Ocean and North American continent in 1848.
The National Road was the only major highway constructed by the federal government before the Civil War.
Robert Fulton invented the Steamboat, which made river transportation a two-way affair.

Immigration
Germany and Ireland were two major sources of European immigration to America in the 1840s and 1850s.
An influx of Irish immigrants contributed to America's intolerance of ethnic and religious deviation.
Upsurges of Anti-Catholicism came of consequence of the influx of new immigrants.
Irishmen and Irishwomen migrated because of a great potato famine in the 1840s.
The Ancient Order of Molly Maguires was a semisecret Irish labor union that became a benevolent society aiding Irish immigrants in America. (1860s and 1870s)
Liberal German refugees who fled failed democratic revolutions and came to America were known as "'48ers".
The Know-Nothing party were Americans who protested and sometimes rioted against Roman Catholic immigrants.