Industrial America.
Railroads, robber barons, immigration, urbanization, the closing of the frontier, Jim Crow, and the agrarian backlash that reshaped the political map of the country.
After the war, the federal government turned west — finishing the railroads (1869), giving land to settlers (Homestead Act), and breaking the Plains Indian nations (Wounded Knee, 1890). The economy industrialized at a pace no country had ever seen: Carnegie’s steel, Rockefeller’s oil, Vanderbilt’s railroads, Morgan’s banks. Twenty-five million immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1924, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, transforming U.S. cities. Black Southerners faced Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and disenfranchisement campaigns. Western farmers, squeezed by deflation and railroad rates, organized — Grange, Farmers’ Alliance, Populist Party — and forced silver and the income tax onto the national agenda. By 1898, the U.S. fought Spain over Cuba and emerged with the Philippines, an empire it didn’t quite know what to do with.
The CED, topic by topic.
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6.1
Contextualizing Period 6
From Reconstruction’s collapse to the dawn of empire.
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6.2
Westward Expansion: Economic Development
Railroads, cattle drives, mining booms, sodbusters.
WXT · GEO -
6.3
Westward Expansion: Social Development
Cowboys, Mormon settlement, the Exodusters, the Turner Thesis.
SOC · MIG -
6.4
The ‘New South’
Sharecropping locked the rural South into debt peonage.
WXT · SOC -
6.5
Technological Innovation
Bessemer steel, electricity, telephones, refrigerated rail.
WXT -
6.6
The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
Vertical/horizontal integration, trusts, monopolies, federal courts protecting them.
WXT · PCE -
6.7
Labor in the Gilded Age
Knights of Labor, AFL, Haymarket, Homestead, Pullman.
WXT · SOC -
6.8
Immigration in the Gilded Age
The new immigration, Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinese Exclusion (1882).
MIG · SOC -
6.9
Responses to Immigration
Nativism, settlement houses, Americanization.
SOC · NAT -
6.10
Development of the Middle Class
White-collar work, consumer culture, the Sears catalog.
SOC · WXT -
6.11
Reform in the Gilded Age
Social Gospel, women’s clubs, civil service reform (Pendleton Act).
SOC · PCE -
6.12
Controversies over Government’s Role
Populist Party, free silver, the Election of 1896 — a realigning election.
PCE · WXT -
6.13
Politics in the Gilded Age
Patronage, machine politics, the country’s lowest voter turnout since.
PCE
Connect to the bigger picture
Era: The Modern World
APWH cross-links: 6.1 Rationales for Imperialism; 6.5 Economic Imperialism; 6.7 Effects of Migration
Next: Period 7 — Empire, Progressivism, Total War
Practice SAQ.
B. Explain ONE specific way that transformation changed the U.S. workforce.
C. Explain ONE limitation of describing this period as a triumph of “free enterprise.”
