Early New England textile mills relied on water power from rivers and waterfalls.
Correct Answer
True
True. Mills such as those at Pawtucket, Waltham, and Lowell were built beside rivers so that falling water could turn their machinery. Steam power came into wider use later.
Category: Rise of the Factory
Question 2
The first workers in the Lowell mills were mostly Irish immigrants.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Lowell mills first hired young, unmarried women from New England farm families. Irish workers, many fleeing the potato famine, became a large share of the workforce later, in the late 1840s and 1850s.
Category: Workers and Labor
Question 3
In Lowell, Massachusetts, the mill company also owned the boarding houses where its workers lived.
Correct Answer
True
True. Lowell was a company town in which the mill owners controlled both the factories and the housing. The women paid part of their wages for board and lived under strict rules on conduct and church attendance.
Category: Rise of the Factory
Question 4
Strikes by Lowell mill workers in the 1830s usually succeeded in winning higher wages.
Correct Answer
False
False. Strikes against wage cuts and rent increases rarely succeeded, and workers usually had to accept lower pay and longer hours. Even so, these protests marked the beginnings of the American labor movement.
Category: Workers and Labor
Question 5
Women at the Lowell mills formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to campaign for a ten-hour workday.
Correct Answer
True
True. Building on earlier strikes, mill women organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1845 and petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to limit the workday to ten hours. It was an early labor organization run by women.
Category: Workers and Labor
Question 6
Factory work gave employees more control over the pace of their day than traditional artisan work had.
Correct Answer
False
False. Artisans and farmers set their own pace and could take breaks, while factory workers reported at a set time, worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, and lost pay for lateness. Factory discipline took that control away.
Category: Workers and Labor
Question 7
Eli Whitney promoted the use of interchangeable parts in the manufacture of muskets.
Correct Answer
True
True. Whitney championed making musket parts to a standard pattern so they could be swapped, which meant guns could be built and repaired without a skilled gunsmith. The principle became central to American manufacturing.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 8
In 1818 the Second Bank of the United States eased the growing crisis by expanding its loans to state banks.
Correct Answer
False
False. In 1818 the Second Bank called in its loans and demanded payment in specie from state banks, which tightened credit. That contraction deepened the Panic of 1819.
Category: Market Economy
Question 9
In a market economy, prices are set by supply and demand rather than by government regulation.
Correct Answer
True
True. By the 1840s the United States had a market economy in which production and prices were largely unregulated. Such economies depend on credit and swing between booms and busts, as the Panic of 1819 showed.
Category: Market Economy
Question 10
Samuel Morse's first telegraph line was paid for entirely by private investors.
Correct Answer
False
False. In 1843 Congress appropriated $30,000 to build Morse's line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore. The first message traveled over it in 1844.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 11
Oliver Evans automated flour milling so that fewer workers could produce the same amount of flour.
Correct Answer
True
True. Evans designed a mill in which machinery moved grain through each step, so two workers could do the work of five. His system spread through the mid-Atlantic states.
Category: Inventors and Inventions
Question 12
The Erie Canal was paid for mainly by the federal government.
Correct Answer
False
False. New York State chartered and financed the Erie Canal, under the leadership of Governor DeWitt Clinton. Its success in cutting shipping costs set off a wave of canal building in other states.
Category: Transportation Revolution
Question 13
The growth of railroads before the Civil War increased demand for iron and coal.
Correct Answer
True
True. Building locomotives and laying track required large amounts of iron and fuel, so the railroad boom created jobs in mining and iron making. By the Civil War tens of thousands of miles of track had been laid.
Category: Transportation Revolution
Question 14
Canals and railroads left rural families more isolated from cities and markets than before.
Correct Answer
False
False. Better transportation made rural families less isolated. They could ship crops to distant markets, buy manufactured goods, and travel to cities and mill towns for work.
Category: Transportation Revolution
Question 15
Steamboats made upstream travel on rivers such as the Mississippi practical for carrying freight and passengers.
Correct Answer
True
True. Before steam power, boats could float downstream easily but struggled to return against the current. Steamboats made two-way river trade practical, and hundreds of them were soon operating on American rivers.
Category: Transportation Revolution
Question 16
Most members of the northern economic elite opposed slavery because it competed with their businesses.
Correct Answer
False
False. Most of the northern merchant and industrial elite had ties to the cotton trade, which depended on enslaved labor, and they supported slavery. Opposition to slavery was stronger in the middle class.
Category: Class and Society
Question 17
Irish immigrants of the 1840s and 1850s supplied much of the unskilled labor for digging canals and laying railroad track.
Correct Answer
True
True. Many Irish immigrants arrived poor and without industrial skills and took hard, low-paid construction jobs. Many German immigrants, by contrast, were skilled workers in trades such as furniture making.
Category: Class and Society
Question 18
Middle-class wives in the industrializing North were expected to earn wages in factories.
Correct Answer
False
False. Middle-class women were expected not to work for wages. They managed the home, often with a servant, raised children, and bought consumer goods that displayed the family's respectability.
Category: Class and Society
Question 19
Many northern wage workers opposed abolition because they feared job competition from free Black workers.
Correct Answer
True
True. Northern wage workers were largely hostile to abolition, worrying that freed Black people would compete for jobs and drive down pay. Many were also hostile to immigrants for similar reasons.
Category: Class and Society
Question 20
Serious injuries were rare in early factories because machines were carefully guarded.
Correct Answer
False
False. Early factories were dangerous. Fires broke out often among cotton bales and machine oil, workers lost fingers and hands in machinery, and an injured worker usually lost both job and income.
Category: Workers and Labor