In this week of the course, you will be studying the Industrial Revolution, the economic
transformation that swept across originally England, then Europe, then North America
and finally the world.  In simple terms the Industrial Revolution was nothing more than
the introduction of mechanical means of production to replace manual means of
production.  At first that mechanization was driven by the application of steam power to
the production process, and much later in nineteenth century that steam power was
gradually replaced by the use of electricity.

The Industrial Revolution had its origins in England in the mid-eighteenth century, and
the textbook provides a reasonably good description of the factors that made England
the originator of the Revolution.  By the nineteenth century, industrialization had spread
quite rapidly outside of England and was increasingly connected with the construction
of railroads.  This was particularly the case in the United States where the railroads
transported goods to factories that produced more goods, but to transport  those goods
to the factories to produce goods the railroads needed the goods produced by the
factories to build more railroads so that more goods could be shipped to the factories
so that they could produce more goods that could be used by the railroads to produce
more railroads.

The Industrial Revolution had a number of negative effects on the Western world.  Not
only did the Industrial Revolution dramatically transform the economies of Western
countries, bringing about a change from an agricultural-based, rural economy to an
industrial-based, urban economy, but the industrialization also had profound social and
political changes.  From a social point-of-view, the Industrial Revolution led to the
concentration of the population in cities and the dramatic growth in the size of cities in
the nineteenth century.  The growth of cities brought serious side effects such as
pollution, disease, delinquency and unrest.  The fact that people also moved to the
cities made them less dependent upon the traditional family and church ties that
operated in the countryside.  Also from a social perspective, the Revolution led to an
entirely new class of the population, the working-class, or proletariat, and a
greatly-expanded Middle class.

The Industrial Revolution had a political effect in that the creation of this new middle
class, along with the working class, led to a gradual rise in the political power of the
middle class in most countries and an increasing liberalization of politics and the
expansion of voting rights.

For this week you have the one-page paper assignment on your reading of Charles
Dicken's novel, Hard Times.  The specific question is:  Citing specific evidence from
Hard Times, describe some of the affects of industrialization and urbanization on
English society in the nineteenth century.  The question is relatively straightforward in
that you have to identify the key effects of the Industrial Revolution as depicted by
Dickens.  Please remember that you are reading Dickens as a historian and not
as a literary critic.  Please do not just provide a list of ten effects, but provide in-depth
explanation/analysis of just a few of the most important effects, such as pollution. 
Before writing the paper, you should review the style rules for history papers in the
course.  Your paper should include an introduction, paragraphs (each of which deals
with a specific point you are trying to make) and quoted evidence from the text to
support your analysis.