Industrialization is the widespread development of profit-making businesses that manufacture products on a large scale, using labor-saving machinery. Understanding the history of the development of industrialization in the United States, which took place over two centuries, involves learning about some of its technical elements, such as technology and the economy. But the history of U.S. industrialism is also a dramatic story of people rising and falling from power or struggling desperately to make the world a better place. Industrialization fueled the national culture, economy, daily life, and politics, creating such tremendous social changes that it is impossible to imagine what life in the United States would be like without it.

Though the Industrial Revolution, a period of rapid industrial growth causing a shift in focus from agriculture to industry, first began in England and Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century, industrialization did not begin to...