A biography of the Englishman who, concerned over the heavy human toll the Industrial Revolution was taking in England, left for America despite laws trying to keep textile workers from emigrating, and established the American textile industry.

Imagine listening as Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrates the telephone, or watching Thomas Edison show off his new invention--the automatic telegraph. In less than two hundred years, the United States changed from a rural, agricultural society into an industrial world power. Author Anita Louise McCormick explores the inventions, ideas, and innovators who helped bring the Industrial Revolution from its roots in Great Britain to America. This book is developed from the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY to allow republication of the original text into ebook, paperback, and trade editions.

This book describes how, in less than two hundred years, the United States changed from a rural, agricultural society into an industrial world power. It explores the inventions, ideas, and innovators who helped bring the Industrial Revolution from its roots in Great Britain to America. It traces the evolution of modern conveniences, luxurious consumer goods, developing cities, and the problems of urban living.

Wall Street and the Fruited Plain delves deep into the parody known today as the "Gilded Age". The last decades of the 19th century saw both industrial and agricultural explosions in the United States. However, the base metal beneath this glittering façade was comprised of sweat-soaked, underpaid laborers, many of whom had just splashed ashore from Europe's seething cauldrons. In the early years of the period, the nation underwent the wrenching challenge of Reconstruction, nominally resolved in the compromise of 1877. In the Gilded Age, America expanded both internally and externally. The frontier moved from Kansas to California. Trappers, miners, cattlemen, and--finally-homesteaders, with the help of a burgeoning railroad network, fanned out across the central plains and the western plateaus. Wall Street dominated not only the economic and social life of the country, but the politics as well. A series of lackluster presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt facilitated this dominion and by the end of Roosevelt's first Administration, America had become an adolescent headliner on the world stage.