•Why is the ‘market revolution’ the best way to define the changes occurring between roughly 1815 to the 1850s? Provide 3 examples, drawn from the Sean Wilentz reading and primary source, that demonstrate the market’s transformation for American society and family life.
To answer:
1.This question is supposed to analyze the OUTCOMES of the market revolution discussed in the lecture
2.Choose ANY three examples from Sean Wilentz’s MANY descriptions of northern workers, farmers, merchants, midwestern farmers, slaves, southern ‘yeoman farmers,’ families, etc.
3. Select one quote from the primary source, preferably one that aligns with the people Sean Wilentz mentions in his reading (workers, farmers, even middle-class families, etc.)
4.Include a shortened version of your answer to the question in your first paragraph (this is a ‘thesis’)
1.Try to summarize what you see as the OVERALL change that your three examples illustrate
1.This proves the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the expansion of the market, not only in the economy, but across society at large
5.Conclude by re-stating your argument and how the author proved it with his examples
6.Don’t forget to cite in the following way:
1.(lecture)
2.(textbook, XX)
3.(Wilentz, XX)
4. (Clinton) – the primary source
- The overall argument in this article isn’t really until the END of the article, on page 6:
- “At one level, commercialization as overseen by the nation’s merchant capitalists, manufacturers, commercial farmers, and planters created a hybrid political economy by introducing capitalist forms of labor and market agriculture in the North, and by fostering a different slave-based order in the South. Viewed more closely, the market revolution can also be seen to have produced new and potentially troublesome social conflicts within each major section of the country. Entrepreneurs and wage earners, middlemen and petty producers, masters and slaves, planters and yeomen all found themselves placed in unfamiliar positions, arrayed against each other in fresh struggles for power and legitimacy.” (Wilentz, 6)
- Domesticity – a cultural value that emphasized women’s important role in the home and as centers of family life
- Working-class – people who have to survive through wage labor, and have few other means to survive.
- you can use these three examples as part of the requirements