Period 6: 1865–1898: The Challenges of the Era of Industrialization

The Greenback Party

The Greenback Party

It was an early political formation with agrarian roots that advocated issuing paper money that was not backed by gold or silver.

Granger Laws

The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was a farmers' organization that pushed for state laws to protect farmers' interests, known as _____.

National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry

a farmers' organization that pushed for state laws to protect farmers' interests, known as Granger Laws.

Homestead Act (1862)

This gave these squatters a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the federal government. Large portions of these lands were used communally by the local Hispano population, who lived in villages and used the surrounding lands for grass, timber, water, and other resources.

Surveyor of General Claims Office

Thhis demanded that documentation of ownership be in English, but titles held by the Hispanos were in Spanish.

Las Gorras Blancas and Las Manos Negras

They organized resistance, including raids on settler-held land and the formation of a populist party. Ultimately, the movement failed to regain lost lands.

Pacific Railway Act (1862)

This greatly accelerated the process, giving railroad companies wide swaths of land through which new rail lines would be built. These land grants totaled more than 175 million acres, generating huge profits for railroad companies.

Alexander Graham Bell

He invented the telephone.

Workingmen's Party

This party pushed for legislation excluding Chinese immigrants from the United States, which was successful.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

This act was the first discriminatory federal law that targeted a particular national group, banning Chinese immigration for ten years.

Virginia City

A typical boomtown was _____, which was born in the wake of the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859.

Indian Peace Commission (1867)

It was established in 1867 to negotiate an end to warring on the Great Plains. The primary goal of the commission was to further confine Indian groups to reservations and pursue a policy of assimilation.

Great Sioux War

This war in 1876 was sparked by the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory in 1874.

Philip Sheridan

U.S. forces led by General _______ soundly defeated American Indian forces, and the Lakota Sioux were confined to a reservation in the Dakota Territory.

peace policy

President Ulysses S. Grant announced a "______" in 1869 to pursue assimilation of American Indians, which involved a move away from treaties and toward individual ownership of plots of land.

A Century of Dishonor

Helen Hunt Jackson's 1882 book, ________, chronicled the abuses the U.S. government committed against native peoples.

The Dawes Severalty Act (1887)

This abandoned the reservation system and divided tribal lands into individually owned plots, with the goal of forcing American Indians to assimilate into white culture.

Bureau of Indian Affairs

This established a series of Indian boarding schools in the late 1870s to assimilate American Indian children into white culture.

Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania

This was a model for other schools, where students were forced to cut their hair and wear traditional clothing, practice Christianity, and be trained in menial tasks.

Ghost Dance Movement

This movement was developed by Wovoka, a Northern Paiute prophet, to promote cooperation among tribes and clean living and honesty.

Indian Wars

a series of military conflicts between settlers and American Indians in the 1880s.

Jim Crow laws

These laws segregated public facilities such as railroad cars, restrooms, and schools, further relegating them to second class status in the South.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The Supreme Court ruled in _____ that racial segregation did not violate the equal protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Steel production

This was key to the industrialization of the United States, as it was more durable, versatile, and useful than iron.

Henry Bessemer

His process reduced the cost of steel and made it available to a wide variety of industrial operations.

anthracite

The most practical fuel was a form of hard coal called ____.

George Bissell

In the 1850s, innovators such as ____ demonstrated that oil could be refined and used for a variety of processes, such as illuminating lamps.

Andrew Carnegie

He dominated the steel industry by investing in all aspects of production, including the mills, coal mines, iron ore mines, and transportation lines.

transportation lines

Carnegie controlled _____—the ships that transported the iron ore and the railroads that transported the coal to the factory.

vertical integration

This type of organization by Carnegie—in which all key aspects of the business are performed by the particular company—is called __________.

Horizontal integration

It is the merging of companies that create the same or similar products.

conspicuous consumption

Thorstein Veblen coined the term "______" to describe the lavish spending habits of the wealthy.

Great Railroad Strike

In 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) announced a 10 percent pay cut for its workers, leading to the __________, which involved more than 100,000 railroad workers and more than half a million other workers.

Haymarket Incident

A bomb exploded in the midst of the police ranks, killing several police. Eight strikers were tried and convicted on scanty evidence, four of whom were executed.

American Federation of Labor

It was known as a "bread and butter" union, with its one goal of getting higher wages and better conditions for its members.

Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers

Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the ________, a powerful union under the AFL umbrella, in 1892.

Pullman Company

This company, which built railroad cars, cut wages several times in 1893 and 1894. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, to come to their aid.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

The number of immigrants from China was growing until the _____. Immigrants were drawn to the economic opportunities of the United States, although many Jews fled to Russia to avoid anti-Semitic massacres.

Exoduster Movement

It was a movement of 40,000 African Americans who left the South in the late 1870s, crossing the Mississippi River to settle in Kansas.

Lower East Side

This side of New York City was the densest neighborhood in the late 1800s, with poor conditions such as lack of ventilation and light, streets thick with horse dung, and a lack of basic municipal services.

Social Darwinism

This was an attempt to defend the new social order by applying Charles Darwin's ideas about the natural world to social relations.

William Graham Sumner

He popularized Social Darwinism in US who argued against government intervention in the economic and social spheres, believing that it would hinder the evolution of the human species.

dime novels

Horatio Alger's "_______" often featured a poor boy who achieves success due to luck and pluck.

Hull House

Jane Addams founded and ran ____ in Chicago, challenging societal expectations around gender and family life.

Brooklyn's Coney Island

The most successful large-scale "amusement park" was __________, which featured three main amusement areas, a boardwalk, vaudeville theaters, and other attractions.

Buffalo Bill

Among the most successful entertainments was "_________" Cody's Wild West show, which mythologized the "Old West".

Baseball

Developed in 1845, it became the “national pastime” by the Gilded Age.

Cincinnati Red Stockings

The first truly professional team of baseball.

Tennis

developed in Great Britain (1873) as mainly a womenʼs sport; gained popularity in America among men and women during the Gilded Age.

Croquet

It was a popular activity in public parks during the last third of the nineteenth century. It was often played by mixed-gender groups.

penny-farthing

The difficult “_______” bicycles, with their enormous front wheel, gave way to the modern design of the “safety bicycle” in the 1880s.

Football

The first contest of this game was between Rutgers and the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1869.

Wealth

Andrew Carnegie's essay "______" (1899) argued that successful entrepreneurs should distribute their wealth responsibly and give back to society. He believed in a laissez-faire approach to social problems and urged his fellow millionaires to take action on behalf of the community.

Looking Backward

This novel imagined a man who falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find a socialist utopia in which the inequities and poverty of the Gilded Age have been eradicated.

Coxeyʼs Army

It was a group of disgruntled workers who marched from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to demand government action to address the economic crisis following the Panic of 1893.

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

The General Federation of Women's Clubs used the rhetoric of domesticity to justify their activism outside the home, and the _________ became a mass organization.

Sherman Antitrust Act

It was the first attempt by Congress to keep monopolistic practices in check, making it illegal for firms to make agreements with one another that limit competition.

William Jennings Bryan

He ran for president on the ticket of the Democratic Party and endorsed the call for the "free and unlimited coinage" of silver.

William McKinley

A Republican candidate, appealed to banking and business interests by promising to keep the country on the gold standard.

Mugwumps

Reform-minded Republicans, mainly from Massachusetts and New York, were nicknamed "______" by their critics.

Stalwarts

Those most resistant to abandoning the spoils system were nicknamed "_____."

Half-Breeds

Those loyal to the Republican leadership were known as "______."

Pendleton Act (1883)

This was passed in 1883 to set up a merit-based federal civil service, a professional career service that allots government jobs on the basis of a competitive exam.

Chester Arthur

He broke with Republican orthodoxy and looked into lowering the tariff, but ultimately, a small decrease in tariff rates was passed.

Grover Cleveland

During Democratic president ____________'s first administration, many Democrats began to push for lower rates, as they saw high tariff rates as benefiting big business interests at the expense of consumers and small producers.

Benjamin Harrison

In 1888, _________, grandson of President William Henry Harrison, was nominated and signed into law the highest tariff in the nationʼs history.

Prostitution

This was a major issue in the late 1800s, with religious-based activists seeing it as sinful, gender equality activists seeing a double standard, public-health advocates seeing it as spreading venereal disease, and anti-poverty activists pressuring local authorities to close "red-light" districts.

Temperance Campaign

This movement was one of the largest reform movements in the 19th century, led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.