The Industrial Revolution brought many changes along with it. The result was a revolution that far surpassed any expectations. The revolution created a domino effect of change in America. The industrial boom led to a rising middle class of workers who were the back of the rising industries. Immigration was on the rise as well. As technology improved, middle-class Americans acquired more and more mass-produced goods. These goods included pieces of equipment that would allow more free time. Mass-production also reflected a greater consistency throughout the United States. .
The change involved many different people in different ways. "Most Americans continued to live in rural areas throughout the nineteenth century, but an ever-increasing proportion resided in cities, and leading cities like New York grew at extraordinary rates" (101). Most cities in the United States grew like this. The people being together did not always mean "social homogenization" (101). "On the contrary, the hallmark of the nineteenth-century American metropolis was its diversity, including segmentation along class, racial, ethnic, and gender lines" (101). A certain complaint reached new meaning during this period. .
"Emerson's complaint was not a new one among thoughtful Americans, but it had acquired a new urgency in the Jacksonian era, when rising personal incomes and expanding array of consumer goods (and of attractive downtown retail shops) produced striking changes in the habits and life-styles of large numbers of urban Americans, unleashing what one recent historian of New York City has called "a revolution of expectations regarding luxuries and comforts"" (101).
The idea of "plain living" was not the case any more and so, more people were changing their ways of thinking and the way they did everything (102). The people "(were) the urban middle class, whose members experienced a domestic revolution during these years that went beyond the acquisition and furnishing of a larger and more elegant home- (102).