A major result of industrialization in the United States was the transformation of the rural, agricultural nation to an urban one. At the time of the American Revolution (1775–83), when the American colonists fought England to win their independence, 95 percent of the U.S. population lived in rural areas, and most Americans were farmers. This was slowly changing by the time of the American Civil War (1861–65; a war between the Union [the North], who were opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy [the South], who were in favor of slavery), when about 20 percent of the American population, or 6.2 million people, lived in urban communities, or towns with populations of 2,500 or more. Despite this there were still fewer than four hundred communities with populations of 2,500 or more in the entire nation, and in 1850 only seven cities had populations over 100,000. After the Civil War, the population of the country as a whole...