Communications Links.

A revolution in transportation and communications accompanied ever-growing industrialization of the United States that followed the Civil War. A national system of railroads, a rapid allweather transportation so vital to the emergence of modern business, completed during the last two decades of the nineteenth century also provided the routes for telegraph and telephone lines. In fact many of the first telegraph companies were subsidiaries of railroads, providing crucial information on the location and progress of trains. The railroads also made possible a vastly expanded postal system and transformed the economies of rural life. Furthermore, improvements in transportation helped create two monopoly enterprises, Western Union Telegraph Company (1866) and American Telephone and Telegraph (1885), that greatly facilitated the modernization of American business by providing quick and efficient means of exchanging information.

Urban Culture.

Between 1877 and 1899 a racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed urban society developed in the United States, standing...