White working class Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves in a social order that was fundamentally reorganizing itself. The railroads stitched the nation together at the same time as they began to wrench people and communities out of their rural or agrarian ways of life. The abolishment of slavery meant that agriculture needed to be altered within the south, and it drove many Americans to seek out new ways to reassert the racial hierarchies that had so long been the heart of America's social order. Some working class whites looked to new political movements to answer the emerging questions and difficulties of the changing times. Many acted to strengthen the labor movement, but found fierce and violent resistance from businessmen and corporations. Ultimately, it was a difficult and perilous time for the white working class, fraught with numerous failures and some successes. Essentially, the emergence of the industrial age restructured American society in ways that relied upon old class and ethnic divisions but in entirely new ways. .

             One of the most significant ways in which the western world changed during after the Civil War is associated with transportation. Primarily, this change was brought about by advancements in the refining of steel, and the invention of the steam engine. The consequences for travel and commerce in the United States and Europe were enumerable. Additionally, the social makeup of the land was drastically changed by these forces. In the United States, for example, when the Union Pacific Railroads traversed the thousands of miles of American soil; often, if the railways failed to pass through an existing town, the people moved away; in fact, new towns and cities were often formed by virtue of where the railroads converged. This began another large trend that would continue to this day: the urbanization of the developed world.