The United States' Start

This article was an overview as to how the nation migrated from the countryside to the cities and became reliant on technology. During the rise of America, citizens who migrated to the United States stayed away from the cities. The article states that less than one million individuals lived in the cities in 1790, but fifty years later more than eleven million chose to reside there. The move can mainly be related to the no longer demand for farm laborers out in the countryside. All kinds of machines were taking over the work that slaves had been doing for years. Iron plows replaced the sickle which would take on average one day to cut a half acre of wheat. Now the new iron plows could cut ten times the amount of wheat in one day as the sickle could. Railroads and canals also replaced covered wagons and stagecoaches which would work far more efficiently and quickly. They could bring goods to the cities in half the time which was highly needed with all the work now being done in the cities. In the factories, advances in science allowed all sorts of machinery to be created which made companies overall more successful. America was progressing because of all the new technology that had been invented. It seems that the demand for slaves died out over time due to the new inventions that took away the need for human work. I wonder what slaves job would be if Lincoln never wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. All the work that their masters had them do in the field had been replaced by the machines that could do the work in half the time. This is definitely one of the positive affects of technology because America has progressed without the need of the institution of slavery helping its economy in any way.

"Industrializing America." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2010.