Guilded Age

Question 1

Define and show an example of a monopoly

Answer 1

Definition: when one person/company controls an entire industry

Examples: J.D. Rockefeller and Rockefeller Oil, Carnegie and Carnegie Steel

Question 2

Define a trust

Answer 2

A type of monopoly in which several competing businesses in the same industry join together in order to control the production and prices of a certain product

Question 3

Define a labor union

Answer 3

An organized association of workers often in a trade or profession, formed to protect and further their rights and interests

Question 4

Define a strike

Answer 4

A refusal to work organized by a body of employees as a form of protest

Question 5

What are examples of labor unions in the Gilded Age?

Answer 5

The Knights of Labor, 1869 (boycotts), and the American Federation of Labor, 1886 (strikes)

Question 6

What were some strikes in the Gilded Age?

Answer 6

• Great Railroad Strike of 1977, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company (against slashing workers’ wages)
• Haymarket Strike of 1886, McCormack Harvesting Machine Company, Chicago (bc communist-led workers meeting)
• Homestead Strike of 1892, Carnegie Steel (bc anti-union regulations, slashing wages

Question 7

What was the transcontinental railroad?

Answer 7

A railroad that stretched from the east coast to the west coast

Question 8

What was the significance of the transcontinental railroad to the Gilded Age?

Answer 8

• More transportation and access to west
• More access to natural resources out west
• More ppl moving out west
• More farms, land and cities

Question 9

Who was responsible for building the transcontinental railroad?

Answer 9

Immigrants, mainly Chinese

Question 10

What was the significance of immigration to the US?

Answer 10

• Chinese immigration helped the transcontinental railroad
• A lot a racism/social Darwinism
• Many people looking for easy labor, thought were stealing jobs
• “Americanization” tried to make them more American
• “american nativism” promoting America and American people opposed to immigrants

Question 11

Why did immigrants come to America?

Answer 11

-fleeing the country because of political and social unrest

Question 12

Define Nativism:

Answer 12

The policy of promoting the interests of Americans born in U.S. at the expense of, or even in direct opposition to the interests of immigrants

Question 13

Define Social Darwinism

Answer 13

The theory that individuals and ethnic groups are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as animals

Question 14

What was the Chinese Exclusion Act?

Answer 14

It was passed by Congress in 1882, put a 10 year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration, was extended for 10 more years, 1902 made permanent, 1943 repealed

Question 15

Define Urbanization

Answer 15

The growth of cities

Question 16

What are the causes of Urbanization

Answer 16

• immigrants come looking for better jobs
• less economy based on agriculture, farmers moved for better jobs
• easy work because of factories
• more ppl moving to cities

Question 17

What were the negative effects of Urbanization

Answer 17

• terrible housing (tenements)
• not sanitary
• lack of water/unsanitary water
• wooden building were fire hazards
• more population means more crime

Question 18

Who was Jacob Riis?

Answer 18

• worked as a photographer for police, got to see a lot of the impoverished lower east side
• used photography as a manipulatable art
• used light and staging to create pictures of impoverished people