The industrial revolution transformed the United States during the 19th century. Due to the size of the United States, railroad construction was key. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, it was possible to travel by rail from one coast to the other. Enormous government incentives encourage the construction of additional railroads crossing the plains in the north and south.

In 1857, it would have taken 3 weeks to travel from New York to Los Angeles by rail; by 1930 it took just three days. Cities with good rail connections grew and manufactured goods and raw materials were shipped across the continent. The great plains were slowly fenced with barbed wire, and farms spread, encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed any adult (including women and immigrants) to claim 160 acres of land. The flood of people into the West displaced Native Americans.

In 1887, the Federal government passed the Dawes Act in an effort to bring indigenous people into mainstream American culture. Reservations were broken up with some land given to individual Native Americans and the rest sold, and many Native American children were sent to boarding schools where they were forced to speak English, cut their hair, and abandon their traditional dress.

Big businesses flourished including companies such as Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil, both of which were vast monopolies. Few steps were taken to small businesses or workers, many of whom were immigrants. In the United States, Social Darwinism and nativism came together to form an anti-immigrant but pro-imperialist climate. The US began to create an empire — it claimed Hawaii as a territory in 1898 and that same year fought the Spanish American War, leading to the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

African Americans remained victims of discrimination. Throughout the South, Jim Crow laws deprived African Americans of equal treatment. This inequality was given legal approval by the Supreme Court in the 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson which declared that “separate but equal” is a fair standard, thus justifying separation for blacks and whites of many facilities including schools, drinking fountains, bathrooms, and restaurants.

New civil rights leaders for African Americans emerged around the turn of the century, including Booker T. Washington, an educator and head of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Washington advocated for education for African Americans, believing that if they worked hard enough, African Americans would be able to prove that they deserved rights and that whites would give them these rights.

W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, also African American civil rights leaders, had a different perspective. W.E.B. DuBois became one of the founders of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The NAACP actively pressed for the end of racist institutions and practices. Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist and separatisst, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association to celebrate Black culture and encourage Black economic independence.

WWI drew African Americans into cities in larger numbers to work in war industries. This movement, the Great Migration (1916-1970) changed demographic patterns throughout the United States. In cities like New York, African American artists and intellectuals started the Harlem Renaissance, a movement to celebrate African American culture. Poets, musicians, dancers, playwrights, and artists all took part.

In Mexico, under the dictator Porfirio Díaz, a new priority was placed on modernization and, in particular, railroad construction; 15,000 miles of new railroads soon crossed much of Northern Mexico. The científicos, a group of Mexican positivists, supported Mexico’s technological modernization. Some científicos embraced Social Darwinist beliefs and turned their backs on the indigenous population.

Others, however, believed that race posed no barrier to social advancement (in 1925, José Vasconcelos, a proponent of indigenismo, would publish “The Cosmic Race” extending this view of race in Mexico). Foreign companies dominated many major industries in Mexico including the oil industry (dominated by the US and Britain), copper mines (owned by the Guggenheims and others), rubber (controlled by US investors).

The Baldios Law (1883) encouraged the transfer of land from indigenous groups to the hands of private companies, and by 1910 US companies owned 10% of agricultural land (the extent of US dominance of the Mexican economy during this time has led to the description of the relationship between the US and Mexico under Porfirio Diaz as ‘neocolonialist’).

The economic development Mexico at this time helped support the growth of a Mexican urban middle class. In Mexico City, you could buy products imported from around the world, but, there were also huge areas of Mexico City, the capital, without clean water or access to electricity. The members of the middle classes resented the privileges of foreign workers and the power of foreign companies. Workers were unhappy and went on strike to get safer conditions and better pay. Many of the upper class also resented being excluded from the narrow circle who had access to power under Díaz.

This unrest and resentment of pervasive inequality became the context for the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). In the United States, in reaction to the abuses of power by vast companies, different groups began to push for reform. Unions demanded shorter hours, better pay, and safer conditions. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) was passed to protect competition in business, Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive president, signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906), and continued to mark out and preserve lands in the form of National Parks. In Canada, Wilfrid Laurier (Prime Minister from 1896-1911) also focused on railroads, urbanization, and industrialization. A million people, many of them immigrants, moved into the western provinces of Canada at this time.