Gilded Age
This time period (about 1870s–1900) is described as looking golden on the surface but was corrupt underneath.
Gilded Age
This shift from farming and handmade goods to factories and machine production transformed the U.S. economy after the Civil War.
What is industrialization?
Manufacturing jobs and available land drew millions of people from other countries to the U.S. during this movement.
What is Immigration?
Muckrakers, antitrust laws, and the Pure Food and Drug Act were all part of this era's response to problems created during the Gilded Age.
The Progressive Era
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul fought for women's right to vote as members of this movement.
Who are the suffragettes?
Critics used one name, admirers another, for wealthy business leaders like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
What are robber barons (or captains of industry)?
Photographer Lewis Hine exposed this practice of kids working long hours in mills, mines, and factories.
Child Labor
These crowded, unsafe city apartment buildings housed many poor immigrant families.
What are tenements?
Theodore Roosevelt gave this name to journalists, like Ida Tarbell, who exposed corruption and social problems.
What are muckrakers?
Ratified in 1920, this amendment gave women the right to vote.
What is the 19th Amendment?
When one company, like Rockefeller's Standard Oil, controls an entire industry and wipes out competition.
What is a monopoly (or trust)?
These groups organized workers to fight for better wages and work hours
What are Unions?
Where did most immigrants travel to if they were coming to America via New York?
What is Ellis Island?
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel revealed disgusting conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants.
What is The Jungle?
Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir protected millions of acres of land, and Yellowstone was the very first of these.
What are national parks?
This French phrase means "let it be" and describes the idea that government should stay out of business.
What is laissez-faire?
The Homestead and Pullman events were examples of this, when workers refuse to work until demands are met.
What are labor strikes?
This journalist and photographer exposed tenement life in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives.
Who is Jacob Riis?
Passed in 1906, this law made the federal government responsible for consumer safety and led to today's FDA.
What is the Pure Food and Drug Act?
The 18th Amendment banned the making and selling of alcohol, starting this period that the 21st Amendment ended.
What is Prohibition?
This idea applied "survival of the fittest" to society, claiming the rich deserved their wealth and the poor deserved their poverty.
What is Social Darwinism?
Wealthy business leaders used this belief to argue that government should NOT help the poor, since helping them would interfere with "natural" competition.
What is Social Darwinism?
Scandinavians settled the Midwest while many Italians, Irish, and Eastern Europeans stayed in big cities. This pattern shows immigrants often chose where to live based on jobs and these existing communities.
What are communities of people from their home country (ethnic neighborhoods/enclave)?
Sinclair wanted readers to care about workers, but the public was most outraged about their food. As a result, The Jungle led to laws protecting these people instead.
Who are consumers?
Progressives believed government could fix society's problems, but first they had to fix this, by making it less corrupt and more democratic.
What is the government?