Industrialization took on a variety of forms throughout the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. While factories and cities developed early in the nineteenth century in the Northeast, rural life and farming remained the rule in most of the rest of the country. In the years after 1865, though, railroads began making their way across the nation, rapidly changing the nature of American farming and ranching in the areas west of the Appalachian Mountains, particularly the Old Northwest (the modern Midwest, including the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the Great Plains (an area of grassland that stretches across the central part of North America eastward from the Rocky Mountains, from Canada in the north down to Texas in the south). New...