Cities & Immigration
This city, known as "hog butcher to the world," became America's largest meat processing center and grew from 30,000 people in 1850 to 1.7 million by 1900.
What is Chicago?
Factory workers during this era commonly worked this many hours per day, six days a week.
What is 12-16 hours
This revolutionary mode of transportation connected the nation, created national markets, inspired new forms of corporate organization, and required a new class of managers.
What are railroads?
These laws in Southern states enforced racial segregation in schools, transportation, restaurants, and virtually all public spaces from the 1890s through the 1960s.
What are Jim Crow laws?
This Scottish immigrant became the richest man in America through his steel empire and later gave away most of his fortune to build libraries and support education.
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
This 1920 census was the first to reveal that a majority of Americans lived in these areas rather than rural farmland.
What are cities (or urban areas)?
This type of worker organization fought for better wages, safer conditions, and the 8-hour workday, but often faced violent opposition from companies.
What are labor unions?
This communication device, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, revolutionized business and personal communication across long distances.
What is the telephone?
This 1896 Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal."
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
This oil magnate's Standard Oil Company controlled 90% of America's oil refining by using ruthless business tactics to eliminate competitors.
Who is John D. Rockefeller?
Before 1890, most immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe. After 1890, this region sent the most immigrants, including Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews.
What is Southern and Eastern Europe?
This new social class emerged from industrial capitalism, consisting of managers, clerks, and other salaried office workers who wore suits and worked with paper instead of machines.
What is the white-collar middle class?
This method of production, perfected in meatpacking plants and later used by Henry Ford, broke complex tasks into simple, repetitive steps performed by specialized workers.
What is the assembly line (or mass production)?
Southern states used these three tactics - all supposedly legal - to prevent African Americans from voting: taxes at the polls, reading and writing tests, and threats of violence.
What are poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation/violence??
These powerful financiers, like J.P. Morgan, organized the consolidation of many small companies into large corporations, creating unprecedented concentrations of economic power.
What are investment bankers (or financiers)?
By 1890, immigrants and their children made up this percentage of the population in most large northern cities
What is 60%?
This 1892 violent confrontation at a Carnegie Steel plant in Pennsylvania pitted strikers against Pinkerton detectives and symbolized the brutal labor conflicts of the era.
What is the Homestead Strike?
This form of energy transformed city life, allowing for extended work hours, safer streets at night, and new forms of entertainment like amusement parks.
What is electricity?
This investigative journalist and activist documented lynching in her book "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and helped inspire the anti-lynching movement, despite facing death threats.
Who is Ida B. Wells?
This term describes wealthy industrialists who built their fortunes through questionable business practices, political corruption, and exploitation of workers - though they often saw themselves as self-made men.
What are Robber Barons?
This famous entry point in New York Harbor processed millions of immigrants who faced medical inspections, legal questions, and the anxiety of potential rejection.
What is Ellis Island?
These young children, some as young as 5 or 6, worked in factories, mines, and mills for pennies a day, often suffering injuries or stunted growth before Progressive Era reforms.
What are child laborers (or child workers)?
British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in 1889 and described this massive facility southwest of the city where animals were slaughtered and processed on an industrial scale.
What are the Union Stock Yards?
From 1880 to 1950, approximately this many African Americans were murdered by white mobs, usually by hanging, in acts of racial terrorism designed to maintain white supremacy.
What is 5,000?
Carnegie promoted this philosophy, arguing that the wealthy had a moral obligation to use their fortunes for the public good through charitable giving and philanthropy.
What is the Gospel of Wealth?