Changing Society

. From 1815 to 1850 successive waves of economic and social change swept across the nation. Revolutions in transportation, from the canal boom of the 1820s to the rapid spread of railroads, stimulated interregional trade and sparked an unprecedented development of towns and cities. In 1820 only 6.1 percent of the population lived in places of twenty-five hundred or more. By 1850 high population density characterized parts of the expanding West as well as the Northeast. The rise of manufacturing and industry in America also signaled dramatic shifts in the nation's economy. Although the textile factories that emerged in New England were relatively small, some Massachusetts towns such as Lowell and Waltham employed thousands of textile workers by the mid 1830s. Americans continued to view themselves as a nation of farmers, but industrialization was taking hold. The development of an urban-industrial America played an important part in the rise of a unified...