U.S. History Unit 3: The Gilded Age Study Guide

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key terms and concepts for U.S. History Unit 3: The Gilded Age, including industrialization, western expansion, federal policies, urbanization, and immigration.

Second Industrial Revolution

A period of rapid technological, electrical, and industrial innovation that stimulated unprecedented industrial and agricultural growth in the late nineteenth century.

Bonanza farms

Enormous, highly mechanized commercial farms that contributed to unprecedented agricultural growth in the late nineteenth-century West.

Pacific Railway Act

Federal legislation that promoted the construction of the transcontinental railroad by providing land grants and government bonds to railroad companies.

Homestead Act

Federal policy designed to stimulate western agricultural growth and settlement by granting 160 acres of public land to settlers who improved it.

John D. Rockefeller

A Gilded Age entrepreneur who pioneered big business in the oil industry using aggressive corporate strategies, such as horizontal integration and the trust.

Andrew Carnegie

A Gilded Age industrialist who dominated the steel industry through vertical integration and authored “The Gospel of Wealth”.

J.P. Morgan

A powerful Gilded Age financier and investment banker who financed the consolidation of massive corporations and industrial trusts.

Limited legal liability

A corporate legal structure where investors and stockholders are not personally liable for a company's debts beyond the value of their investment.

Horizontal integration

A business strategy of dominating an industry by buying out or merging with direct competitors at the same stage of production.

Vertical integration

A business strategy of controlling every phase of a business operation from the extraction of raw materials to the distribution of the finished product.

Trust

A legal business combination where stockholders transfer their shares to a single board of trustees, used to manage multiple companies and eliminate competition.

Monopoly

A market condition in which a single enterprise or trust achieves total or near-total control over the production and sale of a good or service.

Holding company

A corporate structure that buys the controlling stock of other companies to effectively control their operations and bypass anti-monopoly regulations.

“The Gospel of Wealth”

An essay and doctrine associated with Andrew Carnegie arguing that wealthy industrialists had a moral obligation to use their fortunes for philanthropic purposes.

Robber barons

A critical term for late nineteenth-century big business leaders accused of using ruthless, exploitative practices to amass wealth and control markets.

Captains of industry

A positive characterization of Gilded Age entrepreneurs as innovative leaders whose business acumen expanded the economy, created jobs, and improved society.

Morrill Land-Grant College Act

Federal legislation that granted public lands to states to finance agricultural, technical, and mechanical colleges, stimulating national economic development.

Laissez-faire

An economic doctrine advocating minimal government intervention, regulation, or interference in the economic marketplace.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

An 1890 federal law representing the federal government's attempt to regulate economic development by prohibiting trusts and conspiracies in restraint of trade.

Barbed wire

A technological innovation that enabled western farmers and ranchers to fence in land cheaply, effectively ending the open-range cattle era.

The refrigerator car

A railway technological advancement that allowed butchered meat to be transported long distances, transforming the meatpacking industry.

Comstock Lode

A rich discovery of silver and gold ore in Nevada that attracted thousands of miners to the West and triggered the development of boomtowns.

Boomtowns

Western communities that sprang up almost overnight around lucrative mining strikes and experienced rapid economic expansion followed by eventual bust.

Traqueros

Mexican and Mexican American railroad track workers whose labor was vital to building and maintaining western rail lines.

“Juan Crow” era

A system of legal, economic, and social discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation directed against Mexican Americans in the American West.

Las Gorras Blancas

A clandestine organization of Mexican Americans in the West who cut fences and sabotaged rail lines to defend their communal lands against Anglo encroachment.

Sand Creek Massacre

An 1864 attack by U.S. troops on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment in Colorado, marking a brutal event in the post-Civil War Indian Wars.

Grant’s peace policy

A post-Civil War federal policy intended to reform Indian administration through the use of church-selected agents and promote assimilation on reservations.

Battle of Little Bighorn

An 1876 military clash in which Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors defeated the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry during the Indian Wars.

Chief Joseph

The Nez Perce leader who led his people in a fighting retreat toward Canada to escape forced relocation onto a federal reservation.

Ghost Dance movement

A spiritual movement among western Indigenous peoples that prophesied the restoration of their lands, an end to white encroachment, and the return of the buffalo.

Battle of Wounded Knee

The 1890 confrontation in South Dakota where U.S. troops massacred hundreds of Lakota Sioux, marking the tragic end of the armed Indian Wars.

Dawes Severalty Act

An 1887 federal law intended to enforce assimilation by breaking up tribal communal lands and dividing them into individual family allotments.

Indian boarding schools

Federal educational institutions designed to strip Indigenous children of their traditional languages, religions, and cultural practices to impose assimilation.

Tenements

Cramped, multi-story, and poorly ventilated urban apartment buildings where low-income immigrant and working-class families lived during the Gilded Age.

Political machines

Authoritative urban political organizations that controlled city governments and maintained power by providing services and jobs in exchange for immigrant votes.

Party bosses

Powerful leaders of urban political machines who directed party activities, awarded public contracts, and controlled municipal patronage.

Social Darwinism

A Gilded Age ideology applying biological concepts of natural selection to society, arguing that extreme wealth and poverty were natural results of human competition.

Patronage system

The political practice of rewarding loyal party workers and voters with government jobs and contracts, heavily utilized by urban political machines.

“Old” and “new” immigrants

A historical distinction between earlier nineteenth-century arrivals from northern and western Europe and late nineteenth-century arrivals largely from southern and eastern Europe and Asia.

Nativism

An overt hostility and prejudice held by native-born Americans toward foreign-born immigrants during the late nineteenth century.

Chinese Exclusion Act

An 1882 federal statute that banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, reflecting late nineteenth-century nativist sentiment.

Ellis Island

The primary federal immigration processing center in New York Harbor that processed millions of immigrants entering the United States starting in the late nineteenth century.