Lowell Mill Girls, c1850

Questions to consider
1. What was the "Market Revolution"? Is it a useful a concept with which to explain the social and economic changes of early nineteenth century America?
2. How did economic change affect gender and class relationships?
3. Did the "Market Revolution" help to polarise North and South?
4. Who were the winners and losers in the Market Revolution?

Primary sources
The Working Men's Declaration of Indpendence, 1829
Henry Niles, "Morality of Manufactures," Niles Weekly Register. 25: 637 (November 29, 1823)
George Caleb Bingham, 'Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845'
An account of the Cotton Boom in Alabama
Opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the Charles River Bridge Company case (1837)

Infroductory reading
Richard E. Ellis et al, A Symposium on Charles Sellers, "The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,"Journal of the Early Republic 12: 4 (1992)
Sean Wilentz, "Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815-1848" in Foner, ed., The New American History, pp. 51-71 TEACHING COLLECTION MAIN 3297
Alan Dawley and Paul Faler, "Working Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion", Journal of Social History 9 ( 1976): 466-480
Peter Way, "Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction Labororers", Journal of American History 79 (1993), 1397-1428

Further reading
Douglas R. Egerton, "Markets without a Market Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism", Journal of the Early Republic, 16:2, (1996): 207-221.
Sean Wilentz, "The Market Revolution" in Foner, ed., The New American History, pp. 51-72
Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: the politics of Jacksonian America (1990), chapter 1
Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1989), chapter 2.
Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution: social, political and religious expressions, 1800-1880 (1996)
Anne C. Rose, Voices of the Marketplace: American Thought and Culture, 1830-1860, ch 2-3.
Edward Pessen, "The Egalitarian myth and American Social Reality", American Historical Review 76 (1971)
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class 1788-1850 (1984)
G.R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (1951)
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991)
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (1960)
Edward Pessen, Riches, Power and Class before the Civil War (1973)
Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (1946)
Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States (1961), pp. 61-75, 189-204.
Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (1990)
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)