Key Terms
The process of negotiations between employers and a group of employees to reach agreements on wages and working conditions.
What is collective bargaining?
This "Wizard of Menlo Park" invented the light bulb and the phonograph.
Who is Thomas Edison?
This 1800s invention revolutionized communication by sending coded messages over wires.
What is the telegraph?
This 1862 law provided 160 acres of free land to settlers in the West if they lived on it for five years.
What is the Homestead Act?
Mark Twain coined this name for the late 1800s, suggesting a thin layer of gold covered a corrupt society.
What is the Gilded Age?
A system where states leased prisoners to private companies for labor, often used to replace slave labor in the South.
What is convict leasing?
This muckraking photographer took "How the Other Half Lives," exposing the poor living conditions in New York City tenements.
Who is Jacob Riis?
The manufacturing process of large quantities of standardized products often involves assembly lines.
What is mass production?
These state and local laws legalized racial segregation in the Southern United States.
What are Jim Crow Laws?
To make an economy more varied by adding different types of industries rather than relying on one (like cotton).
What is to diversify?
The name given to African Americans who migrated from the South to Kansas in the late 1800s seeking freedom and land.
Who are the Exodusters?
This Serbian-American scientist was a pioneer in electricity and developed the alternating current (AC) system.
Who is Nikola Tesla?
This transportation breakthrough connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in 1869.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This 1890 law was the first federal act to outlaw monopolistic business practices.
What is the Sherman Antitrust Act?
These organizations were formed by workers to fight for better pay and shorter hours.
What are labor unions?
To restore or "rescue" the state government from Republican reconstruction rule, a term used by Southern Democrats.
What is to be redeemed?
She founded the Hull House in Chicago to help immigrants and the poor in urban areas.
Who is Jane Addams?
This machine allowed for the rapid harvesting of grain, greatly increasing agricultural productivity.
What is the mechanical reaper?
This act was intended to "civilize" Native Americans by breaking up tribal lands into individual plots.
What is the Dawes Act?
The practice of using children in industry or business, especially when illegal or considered inhumane.
What is child labor?
A list of people or products viewed with suspicion or disapproval, often used by factory owners to prevent union members from getting jobs.
What is a blacklist?
This progressive leader and educator founded the Tuskegee Institute and pushed for vocational training for African Americans.
Who is Booker T. Washington?
This steel-making process made it cheaper and faster to produce the material needed for skyscrapers and bridges.
What is the Bessemer Process?
This 1906 law, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, required federal inspection of meat products.
What is the Meat Inspection Act?
This 1896 Supreme Court case established the "separate but equal" doctrine.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?