Unit 3: Industrialization and Westward Expansion United States History A

Bessemer Process

A revolutionary technique that enabled American heavy industry to move beyond iron by lowering the cost of mass-producing a crucial structural alloy.

Pacific Railway Act

Congress’s mid-war incentive that accelerated a continent-wide transportation network by incentivizing competition between building crews.

First Transcontinental Railroad

The infrastructure achievement that fundamentally changed the speed and scope of national migration and commerce in the postwar era.

Protective Tariff

A fiscal policy that deepened the sectional divide by privileging Northeast manufacturers, while frustrating southern and western agricultural economies.

Vertical Integration

A profit strategy that eliminates dependence on outside suppliers by consolidating raw material extraction, production, and distribution under one business.

Horizontal Integration

The process through which a market leader increases control by absorbing or allying with competitors at the same stage of production.

Corporation

A legal entity that limits investor risk and accumulates vast capital by selling ownership units, facilitating expansion into national and global markets.

Monopoly

A market condition that allows a single entity or coalition to dictate supply, prices, and labor terms, often undermining consumer interests and competitors.

Trust

A popular business device in the late 1800s for circumventing state restrictions by centralizing management without technically merging companies.

Holding Company

An alternate business structure designed to preserve market control and evade new federal regulations meant to prevent industrial dominance.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act

The legislative response to unchecked economic power, its vague intent to preserve competition led to decades of legal controversies.

Interstate Commerce Act

Congressional intervention requiring railroads to create publicly posted rates and shun discriminatory pricing, marking federal regulatory beginnings.

Laissez-faire

The ideological basis for a “hands-off” approach to economics, championed by industrialists as natural and inevitable amidst late-1800s labor unrest.

Social Darwinism

A theory co-opted to justify labor exploitation and industrial consolidation as “survival of the fittest” in a supposedly natural economic order.

Philanthropy

A paradox emerging from industrial fortunes—where vast private wealth was publicly distributed in libraries, schools, and research while labor issues persisted.

Gospel of Wealth

The concept used to justify large endowments to cultural and educational institutions as a moral duty for the self-made rich, not government.

Grand Central Depot

The urban structure symbolizing the consolidation of regional lines into a national passenger and freight network, facilitating urban growth.

Kerosene

The lighting fuel that replaced whale oil and widened the market for refined petroleum products, spurring a new industrial sector.

Scrip

A form of payment that restricted working-class mobility by tying purchases to company-run marketplaces absent true monetary value.

Sweatshop

A place epitomizing the worst excesses of industrial urban life—where profit was maximized through heat, danger, and relentless repetition.

Skilled Labor

Employment that diminished in value as mechanization spread, retaining leverage mainly through specialized unions and apprenticeship systems.

Unskilled Labor

The vast and interchangeable workforce underpinning the age of mass production, vulnerable to wage cuts, layoffs, and replacement by new arrivals.

Strike

The collective withdrawal of labor, the last resort for workers whose grievances were ignored or disdained by management.

Lockout

An owner’s tactic preempting labor action by halting production, used to undermine the negotiating power of organized employees.

Scab

A derogatory label reserved for those willing to cross a picket line and undermine a work stoppage in exchange for immediate employment.

Knights of Labor

The organization that sought unity among diverse workers but faltered after public backlash over an event involving a bomb.

American Federation of Labor

An alliance of trades that prioritized wages and improved conditions, often limiting its support to those with expertise or craft.

Samuel Gompers

The advocate of pragmatic labor reform, whose restrictive approach shaped the dominant union strategy for highly employable workers.

Haymarket Affair

A pivotal confrontation whose violence tainted labor’s image, contributing to the decline of once-prominent inclusive unions.

Homestead Strike

The conflict at a steel plant in which management’s use of a security force and lockout precipitated violence and federal intervention.

Pullman Strike

An event sparked by wage cuts but intensified by the company-town system and national solidarity, prompting a presidential response.

Eugene V. Debs

The leader whose advocacy of greater labor solidarity and opposition to company towns shaped the national railway strike.

Convict Lease System

An arrangement that survived an abolition amendment by reinterpreting the language of criminal punishment.

Sodbuster

The settler whose very home gave a nickname to farmers who took up the challenge of harsh, treeless prairie lands.

Bonanza Farm

The large-scale operation that demonstrated economies of scale on the Plains—often hiring transient workers to maximize short-term profit.

Manifest Destiny

A belief used to justify cultural displacement, citing divine sanction for occupying spaces already inhabited by others.

Topography

The factor that helped shape pioneer trails, influencing migration by dictating which routes were accessible and which regions remained isolated.

Boomers

The hopeful group who raced for opportunity at noon, seeking legal advantage by being first after the opening gun.

Sooners

The group whose early arrival symbolized disregard for official timelines; their claims were disliked but often retained.

Open Range

The free, unfenced expanse whose loss brought conflict and ended a famous era in American livestock management.

Barbed Wire

The innovation that rapidly closed millions of acres to communal use and decisively shifted the economics of herding.

Buffalo Soldier

A military unit whose nickname reflected a perceived physical resemblance; these men played vital roles well beyond combat.

Exoduster

A migrant whose identity drew inspiration from scripture and the pursuit of autonomy, even as agricultural realities proved harsh.

Angel Island

The west coast counterpart to an earlier entry port, more synonymous with exclusion and detention than with welcome.

Chinese Exclusion Act

A federal measure that targeted a specific nationality for immigration restriction, normalizing racial discrimination in federal law.

Dawes Act

A policy of forced individualism that broke up collective land ownership systems and imposed legal norms alien to tribal culture.

Reservation

A system of containment that redefined territorial boundaries and concentrated diverse peoples, often on land ill-suited for subsistence.

Ghost Dance

A spiritual response to loss and trauma, this movement was viewed as threatening by outsiders and led to tragic violence.

Wounded Knee Massacre

The culminating disaster that marked the practical end of organized armed resistance by Plains peoples.

Assimilation

The coerced social strategy that viewed erasure of linguistic, spiritual, and family ties as prerequisites for full political inclusion.

Carlisle Indian School

The institution that illustrated the assimilationist aim of replacing traditions with American norms under official supervision.

Great Exodus

The post-Reconstruction migration led by Pap Singleton, exemplifying the search for self-determination in the face of ongoing discrimination.

Vaquero

The original practitioner of a rugged trade, from whom much of the clothing, a skilled vocabulary, and many customs were later adopted.

Las Gorras Blancas

The militant group whose sabotage was a form of political protest against loss of land and legal inequality in the Southwest.

Barrio

The term for neighborhoods that reflected both cultural solidarity and the constraints of exclusion in an urbanizing West.

Gospel of Wealth

The argument used to frame elite generosity as a social good, distinct from the redistribution demanded by labor.

Willa Cather

The chronicler whose novels immortalized the experience of settlers and the hardships of rural transformation.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Best known for a southern military campaign, but also played a role in Native policy after the Civil War.

Hydraulic Mining

The resource-extracting technology that profoundly altered western landscapes in the pursuit of mineral wealth.