WW1 ends – The ending of WW1 meant that the European countries were able to meet their own demands and therefore did not need any more supplies from America. Farmers suffered from overproduction and could not afford to keep their homes or pay mortgages, some farmers even decided to become sharecroppers. In 1924, 600,000 farmers went bankrupt. Also, there was stiff competition from Canadian, Australian and Argentinean farmers who were selling vast amounts of grain to the world market. Over-production – Fewer products such as cars, consumer good etc were not being sold as factories were making more goods than Americans needed or could afford to buy.
American’s had little disease at this time because isolation did not allow for contact with the other people to contract their diseases and they did not have domestic animals. The lack of trade and domestic animals made the Americans not as infectious as the Europeans, which eventually ended in their downfall. Next, strategy played a very important role in the conquest over the empires of America. The Aztecs, Mayans, and even the Incans had no formal written language. Europe, however, had the printing press and books.
The number of live births per year increased due to several factors such as children were used to work on farms (source of income) and in those days there was no reliable contraception and little education. The number of people dying was also high but still less in proportion to the birth rates. This was due to poor medical knowledge and poor diet, water and sanitation. More recently the birth rate has decreased and this is due to social, economic, cultural, legal, political and technological factors. A mixture of these factors led to the change in the position of women in society, the increase in equality, especially legally, including the right to vote (legal factor), the increase in educational opportunities (social factor) meant that women chose to educate themselves before starting a family, the increase in work opportunities with laws banning unequal pay and sex discrimination (social/legal factor)and changing attitudes in society meant that it was socially acceptable for women to be employed whereas traditionally the wife would be the housewife and the husband would be the breadwinner and would financially support his family.
Farmers continued to depend on the time of the year and changing of the seasons. But in cities clocks became part of everyday lives, and a clear cut line between work time and play time was drawn. The long hours and low wages was unappealing to most men, so factories hired people that did not have other ways of producing an income. This created a demand for labor that was met by immigration. Between 1840 and 1860 more than 4 million people entered the U.S, this was more than the entire population in 1790.
Farmageddon Review/Summary The movie Farmageddon is about the problems that small farmers are having nowadays. Less than 2% of farms are small farms. One of the problems of small farmers is that the USDA makes farms have to do so much paper work. Some farmers spend as much time doing paper work as they farm. This is a problem that big corporation farms do not have because they can just hire someone to have that job of filling out the paper work.
Unskilled workers fared poorly in the early U.S. economy, receiving as little as half the pay of skilled craftsmen, artisans, and mechanics. About 40 percent of the workers in the cities were low-wage laborers and seamstresses in clothing factories, often living in dismal circumstances. With the rise of factories, children, women, and poor immigrants were employed to run the machines. Industrialization of the New South was a major change to the economy, after the civil war the agrarian lifestyle was abandoned. Due to the substantial industrial growth labor unions were formed to protect the workers and desire for better wages plus safe working environments (AP&P, pg 248-251).
1] succinctly summarizes the de-skilling hypothesis for the Industrial Revolution: new technology brought about “a substitution of mechanical devices for human skills” and “inanimate power—in particular, steam—took the place of human and animal strength.” By several measures, ordinary factory workers were unskilled. Compared to workers in craft and professional occupations, factory workers earned lower wages. Also, factory jobs did not require formal education, training periods were brief, factory work was monotonous and factory workers lacked both social status and market power. Thus a wide body of evidence supports deskilling as a description of the change in the nature of the labor supply. But the de-skilling hypothesis is also about technology.
One major cause of the growing strain between traditional and modern ideologies was the growing gap between socioeconomic classes. Many groups, like the farmers and urban workers, were left out of the middle-class prosperity of the decade. Other groups were culturally excluded. The 1920 census was the first in which more people lived in the cities than on farms. These people insisted on reforms that they felt would return them to “normalcy”, like immigration restrictions and prohibition.
There were limited privileges: not many people voted, and they were not allowed to do anything to improve their working conditions that were legal. There were other groups affected by the industrial revolution, and this section will discuss five specific groups that were affected by the Industrial Revolution. The first group affected was the immigrants. During parts of the 19th century, there were uncommon limitations on immigration as the mounting numbers of factories offered chances for low-cost employment. Due to the different ethnicities, many immigrants found the transition to American life quite difficult, despite their efforts to ease the transition by assimilation into U.S. society.
In America, there was a depression, a period of economic decline and high unemployment in the Western industrialised nations like America. Men moved from place to place alone seeking work, never staying in a place long enough to form a relationship with anyone. The lack of health and safety standards on these ranches is shown through Candy's accident of losing his hand. Itinerant workers were cheap and plentiful and in 1930s America, had no job security, social security or pension arrangements. On the ranch in Soledad where this novelette is set, there are few strong relationships due to the short length of time men spend there.