Question

true or false The Industrial Revolution made life better for most people except the slaves.

Answer 1

I don't see why it would make life worse for the slaves. Combing cotton with a cotton gin is a heck of a lot easier than by hand. Perhaps what is meant is that the early industrial revolution arguably increased the value of slaves, whereas it had been hoped their value would decline sufficently that the institution would die out naturally. That is, early industrialization made it less likely that the slaves would gain their freedom by virtue of slave labor becoming uneconomical.

There's some question of the definition of "better," too. While industrialization made people generally richer, and gave them more conveniences and leisure time, it also made them more unhealthy and shortened their lives. In agrarian 1790s Vermont, for example, a family with four or five children could expect all but one, perhaps, to reach adulthood, and someone who survived until age 50 could probably expect to live to age 70. By the semi-industrialized 1860s and 1870s, particularly if that same family was now an immigrant family living in a city, a good 3/4 of the children might die of communicable disease before adulthood, and someone who lived to age 50 might also readily be carried off by tuberculosis before 60. The problem is that industrialization required the concentration of people in cities, and led, in those pre-antibiotic and poor public health days, to a giant rise in the rates of communicable disease.

You also had a significan dislocation in the family structure, as young people moved to the cities to find work, as wages replaced business income for artisans and specialists, and people worked more as employees and less as owner-operators. All of these ill side-effects of industrialization led to significant social unrest, as reflected in the Progressive, socialist and anarchist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Answer 2

False it helped out eveyone. Hope that helped I had the same question for one of my classes.

Answer 3

Oh, it was true but thankss