The American Industrial Revolution, concentrated in the northeast, would ultimately prove to be the most significant force in the development of the modern United States. This economic innovation sprung primarily from necessity. New England's agricultural economy was the poorest in the country and that helped to spur experimentation there. Meanwhile, the far more fertile Southern states remained fully committed to agriculture as the central source of its wealth. Here, too, dramatic changes created a wholly new economy that would have been unrecognizable to late-18th century Americans.

The slave-based tobacco economy that sustained the Chesapeake region was in deep crisis in the late-18th century, and some Virginia leaders even talked about ending slavery. But technological innovations to process cotton soon gave new life to slavery, which would flourish in the new nation as never before.

The rise of "King Cotton" as the defining feature of Southern life revitalized slavery. The promise of cotton profits encouraged a spectacular rise in the direct importation of African slaves in the years before the trans-Atlantic trade was made illegal in 1808: 250,000 new slaves arrived in the United States from 1787 to 1808, a number equal to the entire slave importation of the colonial period. After 1808, the internal slave trade forced African Americans from the border states and Chesapeake into the new cotton belt, which ultimately stretched from upcountry Georgia to eastern Texas. In fact, more than half of the Americans who moved to the Southwest after 1815 were enslaved blacks.

In part because religion was separated from the control of political leaders, a series of religious revivals swept the United States from the 1790s and into the 1830s that transformed the religious landscape of the country. Known today as the Second Great Awakening, this spiritual resurgence fundamentally altered the character of American religion. At the start of the Revolution, the largest denominations were Congregationalists (the 18th-century descendants of Puritan churches), Anglicans (known after the Revolution as Episcopalians), and Quakers. But by 1800, Evangelical Methodism and Baptists were becoming the fasting growing religions in the nation.

The Second Great Awakening is best known for its large camp meetings that led extraordinary numbers of people to convert through an enthusiastic style of preaching and audience participation. The Second Great Awakening marked a fundamental transition in American religious life. Many early American religious groups in the Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings and believed they could only be saved through the grace of God. The new evangelical movement, however, placed greater emphasis on humans' ability to change their situation for the better. By stressing that individuals could assert their "free will" in choosing to be saved and by suggesting that salvation was open to all human beings, the Second Great Awakening embraced a more optimistic view of the human condition. The repeated and varied revivals of these several decades helped make the United States a much more deeply Protestant nation than it had been before. Finally, the Second Great Awakening also included greater public roles for white women and much higher African-American participation in Christianity than ever before.

The social forces transforming the new nation had an especially strong impact on white women who, of course, could be found in families of all classes throughout the nation. As we have seen, the early Industrial Revolution began in the United States by taking advantage of young farm girls' labor. Meanwhile, the Second Great Awakening was largely driven forward by middle class women who were its earliest converts and who filled evangelical churches in numbers far beyond their proportion in the general population. Furthermore, the Benevolent Empire included an institutional place for respectable women who formed important women's auxiliaries to almost all of the new Christian reform organizations. Gender implications intertwined with these religious and economic changes.

The Republican emphasis on equality and independence as fundamental principles of the United States challenged traditional concepts of family life where the male patriarch ruled commandingly over his wife and children. In place of this dominating father-centered standard, a new notion of more cooperative family life began to spread where husband and wife worked as partners in raising a family through love and kindness rather than sheer discipline. A transition of this magnitude occurred over a long period of time and with an uneven impact throughout the country. Middle class women in the Northeast, however, were at the forefront of this new understanding of family life and women's roles. As with the economic expansion of the Industrial Revolution and the reforms of the Benevolent Empire, the Northeast was at the leading edge of major social changes in the new nation. Ultimately, we need to recognize how the rapid changes of this period included both positive and negative qualities. White women came to possess a new social power as moral reformers and were thought to possess more Christian virtue than men, but this idealization simultaneously limited white middle class women to a restricted domestic sphere. Furthermore, this new standard of womanhood could be achieved neither by working-class women nor by enslaved African Americans.

Surprisingly, cultural independence proved to be the hardest area for Americans to break free from European models and standards. American intellectuals and artists recognized the need for American cultural independence. In 1780s, Noah Webster declared that "America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics." His own major contribution to American cultural independence came through an immensely influential spelling book to standardize the American language. By the 1830s, over 60 million copies had been sold and its descendent, Webster's Dictionary, remains a mainstay of American bookshelves.

The Philadelphia writer Charles Brockden Brown, arguably the most sophisticated novelist of the new republic, reached only a very limited audience with six psychologically-troubling novels published from 1798 to 1801. The first American writer to receive both popular and lasting acclaim was the New Yorker Washington Irving. His most famous stories drew on Dutch-American popular culture in his native state and gave audiences such classic characters as Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman. Interestingly, however, Irving lived much of his life in Europe and enjoyed a very strong reputation outside the United States.

American landscape painting provided the earliest and most distinctively American contribution to the fine arts. Thomas Cole, an English immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1818, began a painting style that celebrated the American wilderness as a powerful and frightening force that distinguished the United States from the corruption of European civilization. Cole helped to found the Hudson Valley School of Landscape Painting that frequently painted in that region of upstate New York, a tradition built upon later in the century by men like Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt who painted further West.

American cultural innovation was both original and thoughtful during the early republic and early national periods. Its most influential contributions generally focused on subjects that distinguished the United States from Europe, like the work of the great naturalist painter and engraver John James Audubon. Nevertheless, landmark American contributions to Western creative arts were mostly reserved for a later generation when major figures like Ralph Waldo Emmerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent would make their marks in the mid- and late-19th century.

At the beginning of the 19th century, All Americans, particularly painters and writers were struggling with the notion of what it meant to be an American.