During the eight decades spanning the end of the U.S. Civil War and the conclusion of World War II, the United States underwent a profound transformation. The nation, broken in 1865, emerged in 1945 as the most powerful country in the world. One of the driving forces of change was industrial development, which began in earnest in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Capital investments in new technologies and expanding national and international markets throughout the century enabled the processing of agricultural commodities and mineral resources as well as the manufacturing of consumer goods. From a land dominated by rural and small-town life, the United States became an urban and industrial giant by the first decades of the twentieth century.

The radical shifts that occurred in these eight decades took a heavy toll on social relations, cultural values, and Americans' everyday lives. The nature and condition of labor required in an industrial capitalist economy differed significantly from that of the artisanal shop, agricultural work, and small-scale factories that defined antebellum America. Individual craftsmanship and artisanal skills gradually gave ground to machine production and assembly lines. Labor in an industrial economy became a cost of production that employers and investors wanted to keep as low as possible. Workers' strikes against their employers in the 1870s and 1880s typically revolved around the sudden reduction of wages or changes in the condition of work.