Excerpt from A Social History of the American Family, Vol. 2: From Colonial Times to the Present; From Independence Through the Civil War The evolution of the American family during the period that accomplished the nationalization of the federal union manifests the operation of several large groups of formative factors that were present at least in rudimentary form in the colonial period. The chief of these was the influence of pioneering and the frontier, the development of urban industrialism, the rise of city luxury marked By conspicuous consumption, and the culmination of the chattel slave system. All of these agencies, it will be observed, are essentially economic and their outstanding importance supports the large lines of the economic interpretation. The first was a phenomenon of the westward-moving forefront of settlement - the most distinctively American factor in our history. The long persistence of a genuine frontier continually brought a considerable part of the population under the direct influence of pioneer life and has profoundly affected conditions even in the older sections of the country. Notions and usages brought from the various European backgrounds were inexorably modified by contact with the rough, large, free life of the New World. To a considerable degree the frontier acted equally on the North and South, but the fullness of its influence was reserved for the free section where there was no servile class to constitute a buffer to its hardships and to modify its liberalizing power. The rise of industrialism, urbanism, and high life were in the main peculiar to the North. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.