Steel Nation

It is no exaggeration to say that the Civil War marks the boundary between early America and modern America. A major industrial power was precisely what the United States was becoming in the latter years of the nineteenth century, and it was doing so at breakneck speed. The country's industrial expansion was not exclusively a product of the war; it was already well under way before the war and continued during the war. But the plain fact is that something utterly remarkable would happen in the mere thirty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. In 1865, American industrial power was inferior to that of any of the major European powers, but by 1900, the United States had become the leading industrial power in the world.