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Economic terms
People and other things
Key terms
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100
The depression of the 1870s forced the American railroads into a cost-cutting mode. The workers for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad went on strike after receiving a second pay cut within a short period of time. Violence erupted; state militia units were brought in, but often proved to be ineffective because of their sympathy for the strikers.
What is the Great Railroad strike of 1877?
100
A type of business organization that occurs when a company owns all parts of the industrial process.
What is vertical integration?
100
An American businessman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a founder of the Standard Oil Company.
Who is John Rockefeller?
100
A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
What is an entrepreneur?
100
The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
What is a monopoly?
200
An economic crisis that began in North America and Europe in the late nineteenth century that had several underlying causes including American post-Civil War inflation and rampant speculative investments in railroads.
What is the Panic of 1873?
200
A type of business organization that occurs when a company grows by buying its competitors.
What is horizontal integration?
200
This self-made man, immigrated to the United States from Scotland without money and made millions in the steel industry.
Who is Andrew Carnegie?
200
A type of economy where products, prices, and services are determined by the market, not the government.
What is the free enterprise system?
200

An organization of workers who join together to negotiate with employers for better pay, benefits, and safer workplaces

What is a labor union?

300
An industrial lockout and strike which began on June 30, 1892 in a steel mill outside of Pittsburgh, PA, culminating in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892.
What is the Homestead Strike?
300
An individual, group, or organization that holds one or more shares in a company, and in whose name the share certificate is issued.
What is a stockholder?
300

A period of rapid industrial growth, flashy wealth, and deep political corruption in United States history that lasted from the late 1870s to the late 1890s

What is the Gilded Age?

300
A steel-making process, now largely superseded, in which carbon, silicon, and other impurities are removed from molten pig iron.
What is the Bessemer process?
300
A policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering.
What is laissez-faire?
400
This event was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration in Chicago in 1886. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police.
What is the Haymarket Riot?
400
An organization that is authorized by law to carry on an activity but treated as though it were a single person.
What is a corporation?
400
Founded by Samuel Gompers, this was the first permanent national labor movement in America, founded in 1886.
What is the American Federation of Labor?
400

A corporate trust in oil refining in the United States until it was broken up as an illegal monopoly in 1911. 

What is Standard Oil?

400

A sham construction corporation central to a massive Gilded Age political corruption scandal in 1872.

What is the Credit Mobilier Scandal?

500
A nationwide railroad strike in the United States on May 11, 1894, and a turning point for US labor law. The strike and boycott shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit, Michigan. The conflict began in Chicago, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 factory employees began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages.
What is the Pullman strike?
500

The negotiation process between an employer and a group of employees—usually represented by a labor union—to create a legally binding contract that governs terms and conditions of employment

What is collective bargaining?

500

A business leader or corporate head whose wealth and management build up a company while making a positive contribution to the nation.  

What is Captain of Industry?

500
A person who has become rich through ruthless and unscrupulous business practices
What is a robber baron?
500
A secret workingmen's organization formed in 1869 to defend the interests of labor. Its most important leader was Terence Powderly.
What is the Knights of Labor?