ABSTRACT
The emergence of capitalist industry and growing cities in what had so recently been a predominantly rural society also fostered new class relationships. Settlement patterns, economic activity, and class appeared sufficiently different between North and South as to explain the origins of the sectional conflicts that would flare in the 1820s and 1830s and subsequently lead to civil war. Town and country together experienced profound and far-reaching consequences from the growth and adaptation to new levels of production and exchange. Beginning with Sean Wilentz and Charles Sellers in the early 1990s, historians started to label this experience as a "market revolution". The "market revolution" came to fit neatly with the emergence of a new "history of American capitalism" that is less concerned with capitalism's antecedents and challengers than with exploring its spread to seemingly every aspect of American life. The market revolution entailed increasing volumes of trade and traffic in the countryside and between rural and urban areas.
