Changes In Colonial America

Changes that occurred between the colonial period and 1860s defined the America we are most familiar with. The colonies started off with artisans who specialize and dedicate their whole lives in a field of work. For example, artisans would grow up working as an apprentices and journeymen to become a shoe maker or clock making. There were others like the urban dwellers who came to the Americas to live simpler lives. They wanted to live life in comfort and have freedom over what religion the practiced. Eventually political and economic factors like open immigration to America and manufacturing changes altered the lives of Americans.
For a while American's restrictions on immigration were nonexistent. There were mostly Englishmen that came the
With people that are this poor coming in the big cities, like New York a place that is already heavily populated, the quality of living dwindles even more. This created a hatred for the incoming immigrants who are also viewed as stealing their jobs. The Americans started seeing that the immigrants “had the most profound impact on New York” (Burrows and Wallace 737). The immigrants took up about fifty percent of the population, there was a sense of threat the Americans felt towards their way of living. There’s a new groups of people who are poorer than poor, who are raising the crime rates, but also running their own businesses. There were more immigrants who were able to open small businesses. For example, the German were doing well in selling small manufactured goods, along with that the Irish and Polish Jews dominated in the grocery biasness (Burrows and Wallace 740). On the other hand, the Irish who were notoriously known for being rowdy and their drinking, made crime rates go up. There was a social change that occurred due to the Americans’ and the immigrants’ relationship with each other. The immigrants brought their way of
Artisans were an extremely valued part of the colonist society. They were the specialist in what they did, dedicated their lives to make what they make. Everyone went to one shoe maker, clock maker, silversmith and that was where their families went too. Artisans were a “large and diverse group filled with the wide social gap between laborers and the upper class” (Nash 8), artisans were the reason cities would be able to run, they made and did the work that was need to be done. They had a thriving time up until the manufacturing processes change. When the idea of division of labor came about artisans started going out of business. People started going to other places, which would do that same work as artisans but faster. When this change occurred a lot of men started losing value of their skills and jobs. They had many skills but no longer had a reason to use them, the only jobs they could get where in factories. In the factories you have set wages and working hours. At this point artisans and journeymen did not have many options to find jobs, if they went to actual artisan shops they would not be guaranteed a wage and may soon be out of a job because factories’ utilization of division of labor was more beneficial to the common folks. This brought an economic change, many people were not working any more because they couldn’t find a desirable job. They went from “independent producers” to “wage worker”,