Emigrated - or left their home lands because of economic troubles.

Ethnic groups - minorities that spoke different languages or followed different customs.

Steerage - cramped noisy quarters on the lower decks.

Sweatshops - dark crowded workshops.

Assimilate - become a part of American culture.

Tenements - a building in which several families rented rooms.

Slums - poor run down neighborhoods.

The gilden  age - suggested both the extravagant wealth  of the time and the terrible poverty that laid underneath.

Suburbs - residential areas.

Settlement houses - provided medical care, playgrounds, Libraries, nurseries and class.

Land-grant college - money given from the states to make schools.

Yellow journalism - a name that came from the paper's popular comic strip.

Realism - approach to literature that sought to describe the real lives of people.

Regionalism - writing that focus on a particular region

Ragtime - dominant force in popular music,

Vaudeville - variety shows with dancing, singing, comedy, and magic acts.

Pulitzer- purchased the New York world newspaper in 1883 and created a new kind of newspaper

Hearst- owner of New York morning journal, was rival to Pulitzer

Mark Twain- a realist and a regionalist, who wrote many books, including adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the adventures of Tom Sawyer

Thomas Edison- inventing moving pictures in the 1880s

Morrill Act- a law in 1862 that gave states large amounts of federal land that could be sold to raise money for educations

Bryn Mawr- new women’s colleges founded in the late 1800s

Howard University- in Washington DC, founded shortly after the Civil War, had a largely African-American student body

Booker T. Washington- an educator who founded the Tuskegee institute in Alabama in 1881

Emma Lazarus - poet whose words are at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty

Settlement houses- establishments that provided medical care, playgrounds, nurseries, and libraries along with classes