<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> <P> In his debate with Sellers, Howe asked . "What if people really were benefiting in certain ways from the expansion of the market and its culture? What if they espoused middle - class tastes or evangelical religion or (even) Whig politics for rational and defensible reasons? What if the market was not an actor (as Sellers makes it) but a resource, an instrumentality, something created by human beings as a means to their ends?" However, Sellers summed up the differences between his and Howe's arguments this way . Howe was proposing that the "Market delivers eager self - improvers from stifling Jacksonian barbarism" whereas he saw that a "Go - getter minority compels everybody else to play its competitive game of speedup and stretch - out or be run over ." </P> <P> Howe has praised Larson's approach for rejecting Sellers' "villain": </P> <Dl> <Dd> Larson here redeems the term "market revolution" from the treatment accorded it by Charles Sellers...Sellers reified the market revolution, making it an actor in his story--indeed, its villain . Sellers's wicked "Market" ruined the lives of happy subsistence farmers, forcing their sons and daughters to become a proletariat in the service of a repressive bourgeoisie . By contrast, Larson shows how the market revolution was made by the people themselves, bit by unwitting bit . His own stance toward this process is richly ironic and nuanced; he never fails to point out ambiguities and paradoxes . </Dd> </Dl>

Where did the united states's industrial revolution begin