<Dd> As both citizen and historian, I took alarm when consensus historians armed the United States for Cold War by purging class from consciousness . Muffling exploitative capital in appealing democratic garb, their mythology of consensual democratic capitalism purged egalitarian meaning from democracy . I winced when Ronald Reagan evoked "democracy" against the Evil Empire though clearly meaning capitalism . I grieved when public discourse translated democracy into "freedom" ("liberty" in the academic mode)--typically meaning freedom to aggrandize yourself without any concern for people who lack the gumption, social advantages, or luck to do the same . </Dd> <P> Professor John Lauritz Larson has considered these transformations in his book, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good . </P> <P> At the end of its war for independence, the United States comprised thirteen separate provinces on the coast of North America . Nearly all of 3.9 million people made their living through agriculture while a small merchant class traded tobacco, timber, and foodstuffs for tropical goods, useful manufactures, and luxuries in the Atlantic community . By the time of the civil war, eight decades later, the United States sprawled across the North American continent . Nearly 32 million people labored not just on farms, but in shops and factories making iron and steel products, boots and shoes, textiles, paper, packaged foodstuffs, firearms, farm machinery, furniture, tools, and all sorts of housewares . Civil War - era Americans borrowed money from banks; bought insurance against fire, theft, shipwreck, commercial losses, and even premature death; traveled on steamboats and in railway carriages; and produced 2 to 3 billion of goods and services, including exports of 400 million . this dramatic transformation is what some historians of the U.S. call the market revolution . For antebellum Americans, the revolution stood near the center of the experience of what happened to the United States during its grand experiment in republican government . For many modern historians, it does so still . </P> <P> Historian Daniel Walker Howe challenges the Sellers' interpretation . First, Howe points out that the market revolution happened much earlier, in the eighteenth century . Second, Howe claims that Sellers errs in emphasis arguing that because "most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets," no one was mourning the end of traditionalism and regretting the rise of modernity . The market revolution improved standards of living for most American farmers . For example, a mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815 (which meant that almost no one owned one) cost five in 1848 (and everyone slept better). Finally, retorts Howe, the revolution that really mattered was the "communications revolution": the invention of the telegraph, the expansion of the postal system, improvements in printing technology, and the growth of the newspaper, magazine, and book - publishing industries, and the improvements in higher - speed transportation . </P>

Which of the following areas was not directly affected by the industrial revolution