Industrial Revolution

Doug Stewart | Spring 2012

New England industrialists hired thousands of young farm girls to work together in early textile mills—and spawned a host of unintended consequences.

In June 1833, President Andrew Jackson, visiting the brand-new factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, watched as 2500 female mill workers marched past the balcony of his hotel.

40 More Critical Moments In American Business History

John Steele Gordon | February/March 2007

1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement. 2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.

10 Moments that Made American Business

John Steele Gordon | February/March 2007

How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known

Crucial Books on the Industrial Age

Donald L. Miller | November/December 2004

In 1800, the United States was an underdeveloped nation of just over five million people. It was a society shaped by immigration, but immigrants from one country, Great Britain, made up around half the population.

Reinventing the Merrimack River

Rosanne Haggerty | April/May 2003

Its waters drove our first Industrial Revolution, and were poisoned by it. Henry David Thoreau believed that the Merrimack might not run pure again for thousands of years, but today, it is a welcoming pathway through a hundred-mile-long red-brick museum of America’s rise to power.

Laying the First Transatlantic Cable

John Steele Gordon | June/July 2002

The birth of the global village

Industrial Revolutionary

John Steele Gordon | October 1992

Oliver Evans did not live to see railroads. He died in 1819, and the first real American railroad line, the Baltimore & Ohio, was begun only in 1828.

Technology Transfer

John Steele Gordon | February 1990

On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol.

When Our Ancestors Became Us

John Steele Gordon | December 1989

In 1820, their daily existence was practically medieval; 30 later, many of them were living the modern life.

It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans.

A Connecticut Yankee in Hell

Justin Kaplan | November 1989

For a hundred years now ,Americans have been reading as comedy Mark Twain’s dark indictment of chivalry, technology, and all of humanity.

After a full century in print, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court remains one of the queerer and more disturbing exercises of the American literary imagination, a brilliant comic fantasy that turns savage and shakes

Two Cheers For Optimism

Robert Bendiner | December 1982

One man measures his life-span against the length of recorded history and finds tidings of comfort and hope

At the risk of being sneered at as a NeoVictorian, I hereby admit to a nineteenth-century belief that, allowing for daily relapses Land hourly alarms, the world of man is improving.

Jackson’s Fight With The ‘Money Power’

Bray Hammond | June 1956

The third in a series on TIMES OF TRIAL IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT

Old Hickory's attack on Biddle's bank had some unexpected consequences

Editor's Note: Bray Hammond wrote this essay for American Heritage in 1956 and developed it into Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1958.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.