It is hard to consider what today’s post modern America would look like without the parts that were played by both industrialization and the “capitalist spirit”. For this class I’m going to discuss the capitalist spirit by using Carnegie as the model of a class of men (and I do mean males here) who moved the American nation into the world power we see today. The full list would include such names as Rockefeller, Morgan and Vanderbilt but Carnegie is so colorful he is an apt flash point for our discussion. As Historians we can detail the impact these men had but it is harder to discuss the process called industrialization. There are many aspects to industrialization beyond manufacturing, but it is possible to trace a direct correlation between industrialization and urbanization then the post modern world. So, for this week I want to discuss the men and the process, and then to detail what they changed about America that helped lay the foundation for the rest of the 20th Century.
Please respond to the following prompts:

1. What did these men do that created such change in American society? How where they different? Or were they the same (as say men in the middle 19th Century) and times changed around them?

2. What is industrialization? Why did it occur when it did in America? When did it occur in other parts of the world?

3. Is capitalism an idea that is inherently part of the American idea?