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    • I: Early America
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    • II: Modern America
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        • The Western Frontier
        • The Gilded Age
      • 1890-1920
        • Progressivism
        • Imperialism & the First World War
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        • The Roaring Twenties
        • The Great Depression
      • 1941-1962
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        • The Early Cold War
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c. 1865-1890:
The Gilded Age

Picture

c. 1865-1890:

The Gilded Age

Essential Questions

  • How did industrialization and new technology affect the economy and society?

  • How did big business shape the American economy in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

  • How did the rise of labor unions shape relations among workers, big business, and government?

  • Why did immigrants come to the United States, and what impact did they have upon society?

  • What urban challenges did city dwellers face, and how did they meet them?

  • What luxuries did cities offer to the middle class?

Learning Objectives

You will learn:
  • How and why the United States became more industrial and urban during the 19th Century and to what extent rapid urban and industrial development produced widespread poverty and poor working conditions

  • How laissez-faire politics led to the monopolization of specific industries during the 19th Century and how monopolies impacted workers and consumers

  • How and why robber barons or “captains of industry” took risks and to what extent their enterprise positively or negatively impacted the distribution of wealth in American society

  • To what extent American entrepreneurs and inventors improved their personal fortunes and the daily lives of Americans

  • How and why the philosophy of Social Darwinism emerged and how the notion of “the survival of the fittest” impacted the development of American industry, government policies and social customs during the Gilded Age

  • How 19th Century industrialization led to urbanization and a distinctive urban culture in the United States

  • How various technological innovations enabled urbanization and the horizontal and vertical growth of cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

  • How and to what extent the immigration of various Eastern and Southern Europeans influenced the industrial, urban and cultural development at the turn of the 20th Century

  • How legal and economic restrictions on migration and settlement impacted various ethnic groups

  • How and why political machines at the state and local levels of government used patronage and favoritism to win the support of big business and working class voters

  • How and why late 19th Century civil service reform and regulatory laws of the national government impacted American politics and industry

  • Why the collapse of the railroad industry factored into the Panics of 1873 and 1893 and how those panics impacted the political and social development of the United States

  • How and to what extent the organization of unions was impacted by racism and discrimination and the consequences for unions and ostracized groups

  • To what extent the American worker gained labor concessions and greater power through unionization, collective bargaining, and various tactics of work stoppage and how these concessions and power may have changed over time

  • To what extent the goals of American labor unions improved the standard of living

  • How and why the Social Gospel Movement preached good works and the sharing of wealth as a means of salvation and how these ideas impacted 20th Century progressive politicians

  • How and why spectator and team sports became popular at the end of the 19th and into the 20th Centuries and how they impacted the development of American culture

Industrial Growth

Picture
John Pierpont Morgan with two friends, ca.1907. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-92327
Picture
Picture
Picture
The Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburg, the railyards of Scranton, and child miners in Pennsylvania c. 1900.
Industrial Growth
  • Robber Barons
  • Edwin Drake
  • Bessemer Process
  • Andrew Carnegie – U. S. Steel
  • Henry Clay Frick
  • Vertical integration
  • John D. Rockefeller – Standard Oil Company
  • Horizontal integration
  • J. P.  Morgan
  • Cornelius Vanderbilt – New York Central Railroad
  • Biltmore Estate
  • George M. Pullman
  • George Westinghouse
  • Gustavus Swift
  • Philip Armour
  • James B. Duke
  • Gospel of Wealth
  • Horatio Alger
  • Social Darwinism
  • Trust
  • Monopoly
  • Sherman Antitrust Act
  • Munn v. Illinois
  • Interstate Commerce Act
  • United States v. E.C. Knight Company
Industrial Growth Quizlet

Labor Movements

Picture
A Maryland National Guard unit fires upon strikers during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Harper’s Weekly, via Wikimedia
Picture
In 1912, The International Workers of the World (the IWW, or the “Wobblies”) organized textile workers in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. This photo shows strikers, carrying American flags, confronting strikebreakers and militia bayonets.
Picture
Two women strikers on picket line during the “Uprising of the 20,000”, garment workers strike, New York City, 1910. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-49516 .
Labor Movements
  • Trade unions
  • Knights of Labor
  • Haymarket Riot
  • Craft unions
  • American Federation of Labor
  • Samuel Gompers
  • Strike
  • Collective bargaining
  • Yellow-dog contract
  • Closed shop
  • Blacklist
  • Pinkertons
  • The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
  • Pullman Strike
  • Eugene V. Debs
  • Homestead Strike
  • Child labor
  • Industrial Workers of the World
  • "Mother" Mary Harris Jones
  • "Big" Bill Haywood

Urban Growth

Picture
“Five Cents a Spot,” unauthorized immigration lodgings in a Bayard Street tenement, New York City, ca.1890. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-16348
Urban Growth
  • Urbanization
  • Streetcar suburbs
  • Electric trolleys
  • John A. Roebling
  • Brooklyn Bridge
  • Skyscrapers
  • Otis elevator
  • Urban slums
  • Five Points, NYC
  • Jacob Riis - How the Other Half Lives
  • Dumbbell tenements
  • Sweatshops
  • Alexander Graham Bell
  • Thomas Edison
  • Typewriter
  • Christopher Sholes
  • Amusement parks
  • Spectator sports
  • Frederick Law Olmsted
  • Social Gospel movement
  • Walter Raushenbusch
  • Nativism
  • Ellis Island
  • Angel Island
  • Melting Pot Theory
  • Americanization movement
  • Settlement houses
  • Jane Addams
  • Hull House
  • Gentlemen’s Agreement
  • Chinese Exclusion Act
Urban Growth Quizlet
New York Times -
How Italians Became ‘White’ 
Picture
Nativist sentiment intensified in the late nineteenth century as immigrants streamed into American cities. Uncle Sam’s Lodging House, published in 1882, conveys this anti-immigrant attitude, with caricatured representations of Europeans, Asians, and African Americans creating a chaotic scene. Wikimedia.
Picture
1886 advertisement depicting the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act. The text reads "THE CHINESE MUST GO. We have no use for them since we got this WONDERFUL WASHER." Many Chinese immigrants ran laundries.
Picture
The idea of America as a “melting pot,” a metaphor common in today’s parlance, was a way of arguing for the ethnic assimilation of all immigrants into a nebulous “American” identity at the turn of the 20th century. A play of the same name premiered in 1908 to great acclaim, causing even the former president Theodore Roosevelt to tell the playwright, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play.” Cover of Theater Programme for Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot”, 1916. Wikimedia.

Political Corruption

Picture
Tammany Ring by Thomas Nast; "Who stole the people's money?" / "'Twas him."
Political Corruption
  • Gilded Age
  • Ulysses S. Grant
  • Credit Mobilier scandal
  • Whiskey Ring scandal
  • Political machines
  • Boss Tweed
  • Tammany Hall
  • Thomas Nast
  • Graft
  • Roscoe Conkling
  • Rutherford B. Hayes
  • Compromise of 1877
  • James A. Garfield
  • Chester A. Arthur
  • Pendleton Civil Service Act
  • Grover Cleveland
  • Benjamin Harrison
  • Mugwumps
Political Corruption Quizlet
The Week - The pen pal who changed a president
Picture
An engraving of James A. Garfield's assassination, published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. The caption reads "Washington, D.C.—The attack on the President's life—Scene in the ladies' room of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot—The arrest of the assassin / from sketches by our special artist's [sic] A. Berghaus and C. Upham." President Garfield is at center right, leaning after being shot. He is supported by Secretary of State James G. Blaine who wears a light colored top hat. To left, assassin Charles Guiteau is restrained by members of the crowd, one of whom is about to strike him with a cane.

Jim Crow

Picture
This photograph captures the lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, a mother and son, on May 25, 1911, in Okemah, Oklahoma. In response to national attention, the local white newspaper in Okemah simply wrote, “While the general sentiment is adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law.” Wikimedia.
  • Jim Crow
  • Jim Crow laws
  • Disenfranchisement
  • Literacy test
  • Poll taxes
  • Grandfather clauses
  • Debt peonage
  • Nationwide lynching
  • Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
  • Booker T. Washington
  • Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
  • “The Atlanta Compromise”
  • George Washington Carver
  • W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Ida B. Wells
  • Great Migration
  • Niagara Movement
  • Atlanta Compromise Speech
  • NAACP
Jim Crow Quizlet
“We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. . . . Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice . . . discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. . . . Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.”

         - Niagara's Declaration of Principles, 1905



Picture
W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were the most prominent African American leaders during the era of Jim Crow laws.

The Start of the 20th Century

The Start of the 20th Century
  • Movie camera
  • Coca Cola
  • Mail order catalogs
  • Skyscrapers
  • Sewing machine
  • Louis Sullivan
  • Daniel Burnham
  • Frederick Law Olmsted
  • Orville and Wilber Wright
  • Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Ashcan School
  • Armory Show
  • George Eastman
  • Kodak cameras
  • Joseph Pulitzer
  • William Randolph Hearst
  • Mark Twain
  • Rural free delivery (RFD)
  • Ford’s business innovations
  • Wright brothers
The Start of the 20th Century Quizlet

Assignments and Readings

Americans Chapter 14: A New Industrial Age
americans_chapter_14_reading_guides.pdf
File Size: 99 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Americans Chapter 15: Immigrants and Urbanization
americans_chapter_15_reading_guides.pdf
File Size: 100 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Americans Chapter 16: Life at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
americans_chapter_16_reading_guides.pdf
File Size: 103 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

When Jim Crow Drank Coke
when_jim_crow_drank_coke.pdf
File Size: 110 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

The Lost History of an American Coup D'Etat
the_lost_history_of_an_american_coup_d’État.pdf
File Size: 230 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Carnegie
carnegie.pdf
File Size: 1301 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Theory of the Leisure Class
excerpts_from_theory_of_the_leisure_class_by_thorstein_veblen.pdf
File Size: 154 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

​Haymarket Riot
haymarket_riot.pdf
File Size: 909 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

​Labor Movement
labor_movement.pdf
File Size: 1954 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

​Labor Unions
labor_unions.pdf
File Size: 337 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

​Old and New Immigration
old_and_new_immigration.pdf
File Size: 786 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Vertical and Horizontal Integration
vertical_and_horizontal_integration.pdf
File Size: 924 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

The Men Who Built America
the_men_who_built_america.pdf
File Size: 120 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Primary Sources

William Graham Sumner on Social Darwinism (ca.1880s) 

William Graham Sumner, a sociologist at Yale University, penned several pieces associated with the philosophy of Social Darwinism. In the following, Sumner explains his vision of nature and liberty in a just society.




Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Selections (1879)

In 1879, the economist Henry George penned a massive bestseller exploring the contradictory rise of both rapid economic growth and crippling poverty.





Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth (1889)

Andrew Carnegie, the American steel titan, explains his vision for the proper role of wealth in American society.





Grover Cleveland’s Veto of the Texas Seed Bill (1887)

Amid a crushing drought that devastated many Texas farmers, Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill designed to help farmers recover by supplying them with seed. In his veto message, Cleveland explained his vision of proper government.





The “Omaha Platform” of the People’s Party (1892)

In 1892, the People’s, or Populist, Party crafted a platform that indicted the corruptions of the Gilded Age and promised government policies to aid “the people.”





“The Tournament of Today” (1883)

​“Print shows a jousting tournament between an oversized knight riding horse-shaped armor labeled “Monopoly” over a locomotive, with a long plume labeled “Arrogance”, and carrying a shield labeled “Corruption of the Legislature” and a lance labeled “Subsidized Press”, and a barefoot man labeled “Labor” riding an emaciated horse labeled “Poverty”, and carrying a sledgehammer labeled “Strike”. On the left is seating “Reserved for Capitalists” where Cyrus W. Field, William H. Vanderbilt, John Roach, Jay Gould, and Russell Sage are sitting. On the right, behind the labor section, are telegraph lines flying monopoly banners that are labeled “Wall St., W.U.T. Co., [and] N.Y.C. RR”.”

Slideshows

Intro to the gilded age from Dave Phillips
The gilded age capital vs labor from Dave Phillips
The gilded age city life from Dave Phillips

Videos

Digital History Textbook

The Gilded Age

The 1880s and 1890s were years of unprecedented technological innovation, mass immigration, and intense political partisanship, including disputes over currency, tariffs, political corruption and patronage, and railroads and business trusts.

A Distant Mirror: The Late Nineteenth Century
The Gilded Age
Government Retrenchment and Government Corruption
Politics During the Gilded Age
Civil Service Reform
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
The Election of 1884
The Tariff Question
Anti-Trust
Grover Cleveland


The Making of Modern America

The late 19th century saw the advent of new communication technologies, including the phonograph, the telephone, and radio; the rise of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines; the growth of commercialized entertainment, as well as new sports, including basketball, bicycling, and football, and appearance of new transportation technologies, such as the automobile, electric trains and trolleys.

The Wizard of Menlo Park
An Age of Innovation
The Birth of Modern Culture
The Revolt Against Victorianism
The Rise of Mass Communication
Commercialized Leisure
The University


Industrialization and the Working Class

This chapter examines the impact of and responses to industrialization among American workers, including the attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from many industrialists and the courts.

Labor in the Age of Industrialization
American Labor in Comparative Perspective
Sources of Worker Unrest
The Drive for Unionization
The Great Railroad Strike
The Molly Maguires
The Origins of American Trade Unionism
Haymarket Square
Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
Homestead
Pullman
Labor Day
The Murder of Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg
Socialist and Radical Alternatives
Biographies


The Huddled Masses

Around the turn of the twentieth century, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe dramatically altered the population's ethnic and religious composition. Unlike earlier immigrants, who had come from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, the “new immigrants” came increasingly from Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Russia. The newcomers were often Catholic or Jewish and two-thirds of them settled in cities. In this chapter you will learn about the new immigrants and the anti-immigrant reaction.

The Statue of Liberty
Emma Lazarus
The New Immigrants
Birds of Passage
Chinese Exclusion Act
Angel Island
Japanese Immigration
Contract Labor
Immigration Restriction
Migration and Disease
The United States's Changing Face
Migration Today
Evaluating the Economic Costs and Benefits of Immigration
Migration as a Key Theme in U.S. and World History
Kinds of Migrants
The Stages of Migration
The Language of Cultural Mixture and Persistence
Music and Migration
Why Do People Migrate?
Who Migrates?
The Human Meaning of Migration
Language and Migration
Movies and Migration
Statue of Liberty Quiz


The Rise of Big Business

Between the Civil War and World War I, the modern American economy emerged. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain.Unlike the pre-Civil War economy, this new one was dependent on raw materials from around the world and it sold goods in global markets. Business organization expanded in size and scale. There was an unparalleled increase in factory production, mechanization, and business consolidation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major sectors of the nation's economy--banking, manufacturing, meat packing, oil refining, railroads, and steel--were dominated by a small number of giant corporations.
​
J.P. Morgan
The Rise of Big Business
The Corporate Revolution
Why Business Grew
Corporations and the Law
The Debate Over Big Business
The Gospel of Wealth
Social Darwinism
Controlling the Shop Floor
Jay Gould


The Rise of the City

This chapter traces the changing nature of the American city in the late 19th century, the expansion of cities horizontally and vertically, the problems caused by urban growth, the depiction of cities in art and literature, and the emergence of new forms of urban entertainment.
​

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871
The Rise of the Modern City
The Skyscraper
Tenements
Boss Tweed

American History II Home
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c. 1890-1920
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c. 1941-1962
c. 1950-1975
c. 1968-1991
c. 1991-NOW

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Resources:

Barron's AP Euro Flash Cards

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© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • acc. PHILLIPS
  • America
    • I: Early America
      • Course Info
      • 1492-1763
      • 1763-1783
      • 1783-1789
      • 1789-1815
      • 1815-1849
      • 1850-1865
      • 1865-1877
    • II: Modern America
      • Course Info
      • 1865-1890
        • The Western Frontier
        • The Gilded Age
      • 1890-1920
        • Progressivism
        • Imperialism & the First World War
      • 1920-1941
        • The Roaring Twenties
        • The Great Depression
      • 1941-1962
        • The Second World War
        • The Early Cold War
      • 1950-1975
        • The Great Society
        • The Vietnam War
      • 1968-1991
        • The Late Cold War
        • Pop Culture
      • 1991-Today
        • The Culture Wars
        • The War on Terror
  • Europe
    • Course Info
    • 1200-1450
    • 1450-1648
      • Renaissance
      • Reformation
      • Exploration
      • Links
      • Assignments
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        • John Green Videos
        • Tom Richey Videos
        • Rick Steves Videos
        • Assorted Videos
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    • 1648-1815
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      • Commerce
      • Reason
      • Society
      • Revolution
      • Links
      • Readings and Assignments
      • Videos
        • John Green Videos
        • Tom Richey Videos
        • Assorted Videos
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    • 1815-1914
      • Industry
      • Ideologies
      • Empire
      • Modernity
      • Links
      • Readings and Assignments
      • Videos
        • John Green Videos
        • Tom Richey Videos
        • Assorted Videos
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    • 1914-Today
      • WWI
      • WWII
      • Cold War
      • EU
      • Links
      • Assignments and Readings
      • Videos
        • John Green Videos
        • Tom Richey Videos
        • Assorted Videos
      • Slideshows
  • World
    • Ancient
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      • Course Info
        • Goals
        • Rules, Grading, Etc.
        • Core Documents
        • Links
        • Themes
        • Thinking
        • Exam
      • 1200-1450
        • Asia
        • Africa
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        • Videos
      • 1450-1750
        • Discovery
        • Maritime Empires
        • Land Empires
        • Videos
      • 1750-1900
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      • 1900-Today
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        • Postwar World
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  • Research
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  • About
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