Industrial Revolution

Things to remember

• After the Civil War in the 1860’s America’s water-powered manufacturing was fully replaced by steam-power.
• Industrialization made possible both ‘the conquest of nature’ and ‘betterment of the species’.
• Mechanization brought threat to many people’s jobs and their dissatisfaction often took the form of protests and violence.
• Karl Marx claimed that new industrial workers were alienated from the products that they made.
• According to Karl Marx, ‘industrialization polarized society into the bourgeoisie and the much larger proletariat’.
• In literature poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, etc. stressed the importance of nature in art in contrast to harsh machines and factories.
• Man was treated as machinery substance.