American History - Unit 3: Immigration, Urbanization, and Industrialization

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms related to industrialization, immigration, and urbanization in American history, from essential concepts and big business to labor movements, new immigrants, and urban life.

Entrepreneur

People who build and manage a business or enterprises in order to make a profit, often risk.

Free enterprise

Freedom of private business to organize and operate for profit in a competitive system without regulation beyond what is necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance.

Laissez-faire

The absence of government control over personal and economic life.

Protective tariff

Taxes that made imported goods cost more than those made in the United States.

Patent

Official rights given by the government to an inventor for the exclusive rights to develop, use, and sell an invention for a set time.

Thomas Edison

A creative genius who received more than 1,000 patents for new inventions, including developing affordable lighting and inventing the light bulb.

Bessemer Process

A process for purifying iron to make strong, but lightweight, steel.

Suspension bridge

A bridge where the roadway is suspended by steel cables, allowing bridges over wider spaces like rivers and valleys.

Time zones

In 1884, delegates from 27 countries divided the globe into 24 time zones, one for each hour of the day.

Mass Production

Production of goods in large numbers through the use of machinery and assembly lines.

Cash crop

Crops grown not for one's own use but to be sold for cash, such as cotton and tobacco in the southern United States.

Corporation

A company recognized as a legal unit that has rights and liabilities separate from each of its members.

Monopoly

Exclusive control by one company over an entire industry.

Cartel

An association of producers of a good or service that sets prices and controls stocks in order to monopolize the market.

John D. Rockefeller

Founder of the Standard Oil Company, who used horizontal integration to control 90% of oil refining in the U.S.

Horizontal integration

A system of consolidating many different firms in the same business.

Trust

A group of separate companies that are placed under the control of a single managing board in order to form a monopoly.

Andrew Carnegie

Owned coal mines and iron-ore fields that provided raw materials for his steel, as well as the ships and railroads that brought them to his steel mills, allowing him to reduce his cost of production.

Vertical integration

A system of consolidating firms involved in all steps of a product’s manufacture.

Interstate Commerce Clause

The first federal body established to monitor business operations, specifically railroads crossing state lines, and require them to send records to Congress for investigations of unfairness.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

An 1890 law banning any trust that restrained interstate trade or commerce and outlawed conspiring to fix prices in a non-competitive way.

Sweatshops

Small, hot, dark, and dirty workhouses where factory workers toiled long hours (12 hours a day, 6 days a week).

Company Towns

Towns owned by a business and rented out to employees, often including a 'company store' where workers were forced to buy goods on credit, leading to a system of 'wage slavery'.

Collective Bargaining

Workers negotiating as a group with their employer for higher wages or better working conditions; a related tool was the strike.

Socialism

An economic and political philosophy that favors public, instead of private, control of property and income, believing wealth should be distributed equally.

Knights of Labor

A labor union that included all workers of any trade, skilled or unskilled, including women and African Americans, and was devoted to broad social reform such as replacing capitalism with socialism.

Terrence V. Powderly

Leader of the Knights of Labor who abandoned its secretive nature and used collective bargaining, boycotts, and the threat of strikes to win gains for workers.

Samuel Gompers

Helped found the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as its president for nearly 40 years.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

A labor organization that focused on specific workers' issues such as wages, working hours, and working conditions, and only allowed white men who were skilled workers to join.

Haymarket Riot

An event on May 4, 1886, in Chicago where a bomb was thrown during a protest, killing a policeman and leading to the deaths of dozens of people, causing public opinion to turn against labor unions like the Knights of Labor.

Homestead Strike

A strike at a Carnegie Steel plant in 1892 after wage cuts, where Pinkertons killed several strikers, eventually ended by the National Guard, turning public opinion against labor unions.

Eugene V. Debs

A former railroad worker who founded the American Railway Union (ARU), an industrial union, and later became a socialist presidential candidate.

Pullman Strike

A nationwide strike by the American Railway Union in 1894 against Pullman cars, leading to federal intervention and a court order to halt the strike because it disrupted mail service.

“new” immigrants

Immigrants to America from southern and eastern Europe who arrived in increasing numbers until World War I.

Steerage

The worst and most crowded accommodations on immigrant ships, located on the lower decks with no private cabins.

Ellis Island

A processing station in American ports from Europe where immigration officials decided who could or could not stay in the United States, requiring immigrants to be healthy and show money, a skill, or a sponsor.

Angel Island

A processing center for Chinese immigrants that opened in San Francisco Bay in 1910.

“melting pot”

A theory describing the U.S. in which white people of all different nationalities blended to create a single culture.

Nativism

A tendency towards preferring native-born, white Americans over 'new' immigrants.

Chinese Exclusion Act

An act that prohibited immigration by Chinese laborers, limited the civil rights of Chinese immigrants already in the United States, and forbade the naturalization of Chinese residents.

Urbanization

The dramatic increase in the number of cities and people living in them.

Rural-to-urban migrants

Americans who moved from rural farm living to living in cities during the 19th century.

Skyscrapers

Buildings of ten stories and taller with steel frames and artistic designs, providing office space in crowded cities.

Elisha Otis

Developed a safety elevator that would not fall if the lifting rope broke.

Mass transit

Systems that could carry large numbers of people fairly inexpensively, reshaping the nation's cities.

Suburbs

Cleaner, quieter perimeter areas where middle and upper-class people moved, building housing and using mass transit to commute to the city center.

Frederick Law Olmstead

A landscape designer who designed New York City's Central Park and similar parks in other cities.

Tenements

Low-cost multifamily housing designed to squeeze in as many families as possible.

Cholera

A dangerous illness that reached epidemic proportions, killing thousands in the 1800s, and spreads when people drink contaminated water.

Mark Twain

A novelist who satirized American life in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age.

Gilded Age

A term coined by Mark Twain, depicting American society as having a rotten core covered with gold paint.

Joseph Pulitzer

A newspaper publisher who believed in informing people and stirring up controversy, known for his sensationalistic newspaper, the New York World.

William Randolph Hearst

Owned the Morning Journal and employed sensationalistic tactics similar to Pulitzer to sell many papers.

Horatio Alger

Wrote 'rags to riches' stories about characters who succeeded by hard work and strong morals.