Changing Economy, Changing Schools.

The period from 1878 to 1899 was marked by major changes in the American way of life. In the early 1870s the United States was predominantly a nation of farmers, with 83.9 percent of the population living in rural areas or small towns of fewer than eight thousand inhabitants. Immigration and industrialization changed this picture of American life. In 1882 a record number of European immigrants further swelled the ranks of city dwellers. By the 1890s many rural Americans had begun drifting into the cities and nearly one-third of the population was classified as urban. Americans living in this increasingly industrial world were convinced that their era was a bridge between a traditional agrarian America of independent yeomen and a future dependent on cooperative activities in large-scale industries and vast urban areas, a change much like the one Great Britain had experienced a generation earlier. The changes from...