Big Business & Industry
This industry became one of the largest and most important businesses in the United States, connecting distant markets and helping create a national economy.
What are railroads?
This 1877 event involved railroad workers striking after wage cuts and became an important symbol of the growing conflict between workers and employers.
What is the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?
This 1898 conflict marked a major turning point in the United States' emergence as a global power.
What is the Spanish-American war?
This word describes a nation's attempt to extend its political, military, or economic influence over other territories or peoples.
What is imperialism?
What was one major reason millions of immigrants came to the United States during the Gilded Age?
What is: To find jobs and economic opportunities / seek a better life.
This term describes the process in which businesses combined into increasingly large companies in order to reduce competition and control more of a market.
What is consolidation / the merger movement?
Would also take terms like "trusts" or "monopolies"
The term “Gilded Age” refers to a period when enormous economic growth existed alongside this major social problem.
What is extreme economic inequality?
After defeating Spain, the United States gained control of these three major former Spanish possessions.
Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines?
What connects the growth of railroads in the West with the growth of American industry?
What is: Both connected distant places and markets, allowing goods, people, capital, and resources to move more efficiently across the country.
Unlike many earlier immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, these immigrants increasingly came from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italy, Poland, and Russia. What were these immigrants often called?
What is New Immigrants?
This wealthy financier helped create the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, creating the world's first billion-dollar company.
Who is JP Morgan?
These three industrialists are examples of the enormously wealthy business leaders who accumulated fortunes during the Gilded Age: Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie.
Who are the industrialists / business tycoons?
Also will take "Titans of Industry"
This president became closely associated with American imperialism and the idea that the United States should use military power to protect its interests.
Who is Theodore Roosevelt?
Why did the enormous growth of American industry create both opportunity and conflict during the Gilded Age?
What is: Industrialization created wealth, jobs, technology, and economic growth, but it also produced low wages, dangerous working conditions, inequality, and powerful corporations.
This New York City location served as the main processing center for millions of immigrants arriving in the United States between 1892 and 1954.
What is Ellis Island?
This approach to production argued that businesses could increase efficiency by breaking production into smaller, specialized tasks.
What is Taylorism/scientific management?
This idea attempted to justify extreme differences in wealth by arguing that competition naturally produced winners and losers and that society should not interfere too much.
What is Social Darwinism?
This phrase described Roosevelt's approach to foreign policy: negotiate peacefully when possible, but maintain enough military power to back up American demands.
What is “speak softly and carry a big stick” / Big Stick diplomacy?
What major change connects America's westward expansion with its overseas expansion at the end of the nineteenth century?
In both cases, the United States increasingly sought to extend American economic, political, and territorial power, whether across the continent or overseas.
Rapid population growth during the Gilded Age created crowded housing, poor sanitation, pollution, and the spread of disease in American cities. What larger historical process caused these problems?
What is Urbanization?
Carnegie dominated this industry through vertical integration, while Rockefeller dominated this industry through horizontal integration. Name both industries.
What is: Carnegie = steel; Rockefeller = oil.
The Great Railroad Strike demonstrated a larger problem created by industrialization: as companies became more powerful, workers increasingly believed they needed this in order to protect themselves from employers.
What are labor unions / organized labor?
The Philippine-American War created a major contradiction for the United States: explain the contradiction.
The United States claimed to support liberty and self-government, yet it took control of the Philippines and fought Filipinos who wanted independence.
Across these chapters, Americans repeatedly faced the same larger question: As the United States became wealthier, more powerful, and more industrialized, what should the nation do with that power? Give TWO examples from the era that demonstrate different answers to this question.
Westward expansion → use American power to acquire land and expand settlement.
Industrialization → use capital and technology to build massive businesses and a national economy.
Labor movement → challenge the concentration of economic power.
Imperialism → use military and economic power overseas.
Anti-imperialism → argue that American power should not be used to control other peoples.
Native resistance → challenge American expansion and defend Indigenous sovereignty.
The United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, while later immigration restrictions increasingly targeted immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. What broader Gilded Age attitude toward immigration helped explain these restrictions?
What is Nativism?