What Is The Impact Of Guns Germs And Steel

Jared Diamond in his book titled Guns, Germs, and Steel tells about certain places in the world having more geographic luck than others and thus causing them to prosper. During the Civil War the North and the South were warring over state rights and slavery issues. While the industrial revolution fueled the creation of new inventions such as the steam engine, the south refused capitalize upon these new creations. When the North grew and continued to grow in its industrial strength, they began to make themselves a world power, causing the South to continue to mostly produce cotton and several other agricultural crops. The South didn’t provide many new technologies which limited there economic effect on trade and production. The North’s Geographic

The technological advancement of steam power helped command the factories and power ships. Steam power gave the north an advantage in war because it was faster and less labor intensive, therefore the South would need to fight back in a way that was impossible for them to match (Steel). The Ships that the Unions factories began producing consisted of iron plating that made them incredibly difficult to sink (steel). The Union was so superior in the navy because “In the South, where iron was scarce and the ability to make powerful steam engines was virtually nonexistent, Confederates were also forced to seek other methods of protecting their ports from an increasingly armored Union fleet” (Steel). The mixture of the steam power and iron ships made it incredibly difficult for the confederates to have any naval advantages and that was simply because the Northern geographic wealth forced them to make technological advancements for the factories which was later put into use of producing powerful materials for making ships of war (steel). During the War the Union’s economy caused by factories provided the stable enough economy to influence a growth in communication. The North began to produce more and more newspapers because of the newer invention of a more efficient printing press that would spread the propaganda of the war. The political cartoons in the newspaper would give a moral boost and part out opinions of the war (Martin). Also the mass use of the telegraph allowed President Lincoln to be the first to be able to communicate directly and quickly with the battlefield (Civil War Technology). During the Civil war the Union had “trained 1,200 operators, strung 4,000 miles of telegraph wire and sent more than a million messages to and from the battlefield,” which was