Industrial Titans & Big Business
This Scottish immigrant rose from poverty to dominate the U.S. steel industry and advocated for the "Gospel of Wealth."
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
Thomas Edison created a commercially successful, long-lasting version of this invention at his Menlo Park research lab in 1879.
What is the incandescent light bulb?
Led by Samuel Gompers, this major union focused strictly on skilled workers and practical "bread-and-butter" goals like higher wages and shorter workdays.
What is the American Federation of Labor (AFL)?
These dark, overcrowded, poorly ventilated apartment buildings housed millions of working-class immigrant families in major industrial cities.
What are tenements?
The Supreme Court legalized racial segregation across the South in this landmark 1896 ruling that established the doctrine of "separate but equal."
What is Plessy v Ferguson?
Adapted from biological theory by Herbert Spencer, this philosophy claimed that financial wealth proved a person was naturally "fit," while poverty resulted from personal weakness.
What is Social Darwinism?
He patented the telephone in 1876, dramatically speeding up communication across the United States.
Who is Alexander Graham Bell?
Unlike most unions of its time, this group led by Terence Powderly opened its membership to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and African Americans.
Who are the Knights of Labor?
Unlike earlier waves from Northern Europe, the "New Immigrants" arriving between 1880 and 1920 primarily came from these two regions of Europe
What are Southern and Eastern Europe? (e.g., Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece)
This agricultural system trapped many Black southern farmers in inescapable debt by forcing them to give a large portion of their crops to landowners.
What is sharecropping (or the crop-lien system / debt peonage)?
Carnegie used this strategy to cut costs by purchasing every step of production—from raw iron mines to shipping fleets and steel mills.
What is Vertical Integration (or Vertical Consolidation)?
This industrial technique revolutionized building and rail transport by forcing cold air through molten iron to mass-produce cheap, strong steel.
What is the Bessemer Process?
A bomb thrown during this 1886 Chicago protest killed police officers and turned public opinion against labor unions by associating them with radical anarchism.
What is the Haymarket Square Riot?
This journalist used flash photography to expose horrific slum conditions in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives.
Who is Jacob Riis?
Founder of the Tuskegee Institute who argued in his "Atlanta Compromise" speech that Black Americans should focus on vocational skills and economic self-reliance first.
Who is Booker T. Washington?
Passed by Congress in 1890 to restore market competition, this law was initially misapplied by federal courts to break up labor unions instead of trusts.
What is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?
These two immigrant groups provided the majority of the labor force required to construct the Transcontinental Railroad.
Who are Chinese and Irish immigrants?
President Cleveland sent federal troops to crush this 1894 strike on the legal grounds that blocking rail traffic interfered with the delivery of U.S. mail.
What is the Pullman Strike?
Enacted in 1882, this law marked the first time the U.S. federal government banned an entire national group from immigrating to the country.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Harvard educated co-founder of the NAACP who demanded immediate legal and political equality and advocated educating the "Talented Tenth."
Who is W. E. B. DuBois?
John D. Rockefeller controlled over 90% of the nation’s oil refining industry through this famous business combination.
What is Standard Oil (or Standard Oil Trust)?
Beyond inventing the incandescent bulb, he established an "invention factory" at Menlo Park and constructed the nation's first central electrical power station.
Factory owners forced prospective employees to sign these written pledges promising never to join a labor union as a condition of employment.
What are "yellow-dog contracts"?
Political organizations like New York's Tammany Hall kept control of city governments by giving immigrants jobs, housing, and food in exchange for these.
What are votes?
This fearless Black female journalist published Southern Horrors to expose the truth about lynching and disprove false claims used to justify mob violence.
Who is Ida B. Wells?