How many states had a public school system by 1815
From 1815 to 1850 successive waves of economic and social changes swept across the nation. Revolutions in transportation, from the canal boom of the 1820s to the rapid spread of railroads, stimulated interregional trade and sparked an unprecedented development of towns and cities. In 1820 only 6.1 percent of the population lived in places of twenty-five hundred or more. By 1850 high population density characterized parts of the expanding West as well as the Northeast. The rise of manufacturing and industry in America also signaled dramatic shifts in the nation’s economy. Although the textile factories that emerged in New England were relatively small, some Massachusetts towns such as Lowell and Waltham employed thousands of textile workers by the mid 1830s. Americans continued to view themselves as a nation of farmers, but industrialization was taking hold. The development of an urban-industrial America played an important part in the rise of a unified movement for public schools, which found most of its support in the nation’s expanding cities. Changes in the population also sparked educational reform. Just as immigration proved vital to the emergence of an industrial America, the influx of German and Irish immigrants with different cultures, beliefs, and religions seemed to threaten the stability of an American way of life and system of beliefs. Much educational reform aimed at trying to instill uniform values and cultural norms to counteract the forces of social instability that were transforming a predominantly agricultural and relatively homogeneous nation.
