500 PART FOUR FORGING AN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY ??? 1865?1899 Anation of farmers fought the Civil War in the1860s. By the time the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, America was an industrial nation. For generations Americans had plunged into the wilderness and plowed their fields. Now they settled in cities and toiled in factories. Between the Civil War and the century?s end, economic and techno- logical change came so swiftly and massively that it seemed to many Americans that a whole new civi- lization had emerged. In some ways it had. The sheer scale of the new industrial civilization was dazzling. Transcontinen- tal railroads knit the country together from sea to sea. New industries like oil and steel grew to stag- gering size?and made megamillionaires out of