How did industrial growth and the business cycle impact farmers and the development of the Populist movement?

Industrialization took on a variety of forms throughout the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. While factories and cities developed early in the nineteenth century in the Northeast, rural life and farming remained the rule in most of the rest of the country. In the years after 1865, though, railroads began making their way across the nation, rapidly changing the nature of American farming and ranching in the areas west of the Appalachian Mountains, particularly the Old Northwest (the modern Midwest, including the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the Great Plains (an area of grassland that stretches across the central part of North America eastward from the Rocky Mountains, from Canada in the north down to Texas in the south). New methods of transportation allowed more products to be grown, and new technology for farming and processing foods made it possible for farmers to grow more food.

Unfortunately, it would be decades before the country's economic and political systems would adapt to the new capacity of its farms.

monopolies  came to the united states with the colonial administration. the large-scale public works needed to make the new world hospitable to old world immigrants required large companies to carry them out. these companies were granted exclusive contracts for these works by the colonial administrators. even after the american revolution, many of these colonial holdovers still functioned due to the contracts and land

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