Technological advances transformed America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the period known as the
Gilded Age. Enterprising Americans built on the innovations of the first
Industrial Revolution and the national networks of transportation and communication established by
railroad track and
telegraph line earlier in the century. They created new industries and tapped into a truly national market for manufactures and consumer goods. By 1900, the turn of the century and what historians refer to as the Second Industrial Revolution, American society was one of mass production, mass consumption, and mass marketing, and the nation was poised to assume the global lead in technology and industry. In short, the United States emerged from the final decades of the nineteenth century as an increasingly urban, heavily industrialized world power—the product of a technological transformation that profoundly altered American life and society in every respect.