History-Gilded Age

Gilded Age

Mark Twain used this term to describe the time period in American history when many social problems were masked by a thin layer of gold that made things loook better than they actually were.

Melting Pot

Blending together in cultures in America to high immigration numbers in the late 19th century.

Nativism

Anti-immigration movement during a period of high immigration in the late 19th century.

Ellis island

Processing center for incoming European immigrants arriving in New York.

Horizontal integration

Business strategy where a company grows by merging width or buying companies that make the same product.

Vertical integration

business strategy where a company controls stages of it’s supply chain.

Urbanization

Growth of cities

John D. Rockefeller

Associated with standard oil

Exodusters

Blacks that left North Carolina and the south to the great plains, mainly Kansas in the 1870’s

Homestead Act

-Gave settlers up to 160 acres of land in the West

-Required settlers to improve land and live on it for 5 years

-Signed into law by president Lincoln

Chinese immigrants

Came to the U.S. to work on the railroad

Promontory point

Place where Eastern and Western parts of the Transcontinental railroad met.

Henry Bessemer

Advanced steel process

James Hargreaves

Spinning jenny

Eli Whitney

Cotton gin

James Watt

steam engine

Edward Jenner

Small pox vaccine

Henry Ford

Model T automobile

Guglielmo Marconi

Radio

Thomas Edison

Phonograph and record player

Wright brothers

Invented first functional airplane

Monopoly

Business where one single company supplies all the products.

Laissez-Faire

Few government regulations on industry

Robber Barons

-squashed all competition

-payed low wages

-exploited workers

-used influences to manipulate government policies

Andrew Carnegie

Gave away millions of dollars to poor schools and other social programs

Cornelius Vanderbilt

Known for controlling shipping and railroads

Jacob Riis

Photographed nameless children and people living in tenements

Upton Sinclair

-wrote “the jungle”

-worked in a neat packing plant to observe unsafe conditions and unhealthy meat.

Cities

Expanded with the development of subways, skyscrapers, and suspensions.

Tenements

Purpose was to provide single family homes for working class families.

Skyscrapers

Made possible by the invention of Bessemer process and elevators.