Key Concepts in U.S. Immigration, Race, and Urban Life

Ku Klux Klan

A violent white supremacist organization that grew in the South after the Civil War, threatening, attacking, and lynching African Americans, and helping push many of them to leave the rural South for northern and midwestern cities

Josiah Strong

A Protestant minister and author of Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, who argued that newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were a threat to the moral fiber of the United States and urged Americans to resist them

American Protective Association

A political activist group formed by Americans who resented new immigrants and lobbied Congress to restrict immigration, including pushing for a literacy test and supporting laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and later quota laws

Dillingham Commission

A commission created by Congress in 1907 to study immigration, whose report emphasized how newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe looked, spoke, and worshiped differently, reinforcing ethnic labels and helping justify discrimination

Jacob Riis

A Danish immigrant and police reporter in New York who documented slum and tenement life through photographs and writing, especially in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, which exposed overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and helped inspire reform

Great Migration

The large movement between the end of the Civil War and the early twentieth century in which nearly two million African Americans left the rural South and moved mainly to northern and midwestern cities to seek better wages and escape violence

Ellis Island

An immigration station in New York City that opened in 1892 as the official port of entry for most European immigrants, where doctors and nurses inspected arrivals, about 2 percent were denied entry, and the rest entered the country through New York

Porters

A common type of work for African American men in the North, where they were often employed in the railroad industry on trains, including in the celebrated Pullman dining and sleeping cars

Redlining

A discriminatory mortgage and banking practice in northern cities in which lenders refused home loans to qualified African American buyers

Ethnic Enclaves

Neighborhoods where immigrants clustered with others who shared their language and culture, such as Little Italy or Chinatown, which provided familiar food, newspapers, and community but also added to congestion and overcrowding in poor districts

John D. Rockefeller

The founder of Standard Oil who built a near-monopoly on oil refining

Pullman Strike

A nationwide railroad strike sparked by wage cuts and high rents in the company town of Pullman

Patrons of Husbandry

An early farmers' organization created by Oliver Hudson Kelley that promoted cooperatives and pushed for state regulations like the Granger Laws, also called Grange

The Gospel of Wealth

Carnegie's argument that wealthy people should use their fortunes for the public good

George Westinghouse

An industrialist whose alternating current power system made electricity widely accessible

Robber Baron

A negative term used for newly minted millionaires in the late 1800s that connoted the belief that they exploited workers and bent laws to succeed

Cornelius Vanderbilt

A railroad magnate who consolidated major rail lines into a powerful corporation that connected Midwestern suppliers to eastern markets

Civil Service Reform

Efforts to reduce or eliminate the spoils system by requiring government jobs to be awarded on the basis of examinations and merit

Gilded Age

A term coined by Mark Twain to describe the post-Civil War era, in which rapid industrial growth and national excitement were only a thin layer covering widespread corruption, economic inequality, and political dysfunction

Haymarket Affair

A violent clash in Chicago after a bomb was thrown at police during a labor rally, damaging public support for labor

Thomas Edison

An inventor whose creations, including the light bulb and phonograph, transformed modern life

Gold Standard

A monetary system supported by the federal government that based currency on gold alone, restricting the money supply and contributing to farmers' hardships

Spoils System

The practice of awarding government jobs based on political loyalty rather than merit, described as central to how presidents exercised power and maintained political alliances