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Charles Seller's Response To The Market Revolution

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Similar to the Industrial Revolution the phrase "market revolution" is explained in Charles Sellers's The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, which offers a look at the antebellum period through the rapidly changing market through cultural, social, and economic perspectives. Sellers describes America’s massively growing “capitalist market” was “history's most revolutionary force,” and that this new push of capitalism was “wresting the American future from history's most conservative force, the land” (Sellers, 4). This change in American culture turned a craft economy to a more laissez faire market of capitalism. The majority of Americans moved from self-employment and bartering to industrial and factory style work, changing the system from bartering and trade to an hour and wage system that supported the growing consumer market. The past handmade items that were low in variety and unique then turned into items that could be made in a very large and identical capacity for profit. Further, this “market revolution stressed Americans into unparalleled mobilization” that now dictated the lives of everyone swept up in it (Sellers, 4). Sellers explains that the market promoted a “competitive pursuit of wealth by open-ended production of commodity” which lured the American people into a false sense of individualism with each product they amassed (Sellers, 5). This created a new way to project the American image through the things that were owned. Bushman illustrates

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