Gilded Age Review Flashcards
Age of Invention
- 1870 to 1940, the time period when there were lots of new inventions
Monopoly
- the exclusive control over a trade or business
Trust -
A trust is a legal arrangement in which a group of companies turns over their stock to a board of trustees, who then manage the companies as a single entity.
Carnegie/Rockefeller/Morgan
- carnegie steel, rockefeller standard oil company, morgan railroads
Vanderbilt
- built his wealth in railroads and shipping
Horizontal Integration (Rockefeller)
- when a company merges/acquires another company that is in the same industry and is in the same money bracket
Vertical Integration (Carnegie) -
when an ownership takes ownership of multiple stages of a products development
Social Darwinism
- the idea that people become more powerful in society because they are innately better
Gospel of Wealth
- the theory that the richest people should actively engage in philanthropy
Interstate Commerce Act 1887 -
addressed the problem of railroad monopolies by setting guidelines for how they could do business
Why were the railroad companies hated?
- because they believed them to be dangerous and obnoxious, they also wouldn’t always publicly post their rates and the rates would be more expensive for some people than they would for others
National Labor Union
- made to improve the rights and working conditions of workers
Haymarket Square Riot
- a bomb went off after police broke up a group of labor unionists, both police officers and unionists were injured or died
Knights of Labor (Terrance Powderly)
- The organization campaigned for an eight-hour work day, the abolition of child labor, improved safety in factories, equal pay for men and women, and compensation for on-the-job injury, howardly was the head of the union
Great Railroad strike
- wages were cut for workers which led to a strike, briefly paralyzed the countries commerce
Homestead Strike
- strike in carnegie’s steel company, 16 people died and many more were injured
American Federation of Labor (AFL) (Samuel Gompers)
- the first federation of labor unions in the united states
Morrill Land Grant Act
- made it possible for states to establish public colleges funded by the development or sale of associated federal land grants
Segregation (Jim Crow Laws)
- a set of mandates that separated the black and white, this included schools, parks, water fountains, buses, etc.
Closed shop
- a form of union security agreement where the employer agrees to hire only labor union members
Literacy tests/poll tax/grandfather clause/KKK
- a set of rules that controlled who could vote, they would be rigged to only allow white people to vote
Homestead Act of 1862
- said that any citizen who had never borne arms against the U.S. could apply to claim 160 acres of land
Plessy v Ferguson 1898 -
said that segregation was legal and constitutional as long as the facilities for both races were equal in quality
Pendleton Act 1883 -
stated that government jobs had to be awarded by merit and not political affiliation