| This thesis examines the dynamic change the market revolution had on social and cultural institutions in the American West. Specifically, it investigates how market forces influenced rural life patterns for farmers, urban mercantile culture and regional commercial interests. Davenport, Iowa is the focus for the narrative's hinge, as this midsized western marketplace represented a link between its farmers and the regional markets in Chicago. This project uses wheat and the prairie region in antebellum Iowa and Illinois as a case study and examines the cultural and social development of farmers and merchants in the marketplace. Following wheat from farm to market, both locally and regionally, helps to explain how Americans understood the commodity at each economic level. Time and place were central to the American West's economic, social, and cultural development and this thesis considers just a moment in its history. A intersect of rural, agricultural, technological, and environmental histories are at the project's core, but it also attempts to make sense of frontier capitalism and the ramifications it had on farming and the grain industry. The market revolution gradually influenced and shaped the nation's agricultural economy and the people that preformed its labor and production. |
