ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interpretive schemes and images which pertain to industrialization overlap with and merge with many pertaining to mobility, frontier, farm, city, and immigration. Discussion of the industrial images can be focused on questions of power and social order. As America moved from home industries to its present industrialization, this transformation of the nation was accompanied by countless attempts to make sense of the economic and social changes. Alexis De Tocqueville is especially important if only because his writing provides a reference point to which American scholars return again and again during their own commentaries on America. Within ten years, an American economist, Henry Carey, had with conscious intent stood de Tocqueville's thesis on its head, arguing that the pursuit and prevalance of equality were merely the consequence of a favorable set of economic and institutional conditions.
