Period 6: 1865-1898

Question 1

How did farming change during this period?

Answer 1

• The mecahnization of Agriculture started occour
• Examples include the mechanical reaper and combine harvester (Both of these are used to harvest grain and seeds)
• Allowed farmers to harvest many more crops than they otherwise could, such as corn and wheat
• Small farmers started to die out, and larger mechanized farms bought them
• The cost of crops decreased, which caused econmic problem for small farmers

Question 2

Give an example of how farmers responded to the changes in farming during this period. What did their response lead to?

Answer 2

• Small farmer suffered due to decreasing crop prices, increased mechanization, increasing cost of textiles and other goods, and unfair rail transport prices
• The formed the National Grange Movement to protest these changes
• The Grange Movement pushed Midwestern states to regulate railroad rates for freight and made abusive corporate policies that hurt farmers illegal
• Their response lead to the Granger Laws, the most important of which was the Commerce Act, which required railroad rates to reasonable and just and created the Interstate Commerce Commission to do so.

Question 3

How was the movement of people Westward in this period different that in Period 4 and part of Period 5?

Answer 3

• Westward expansion in this period was highly dependent on railroads, unlike in pervious periods which used long trails, Oxen, and horses

Question 4

How did the Us Government Facillitate Westward expansion during this period? Give specific examples.

Answer 4

1. Pacific Railroads Act: Federal Gov. Granted large areas of land to railroad companies to build a transcontinental railroad. The Transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869
2. Homestead Act: Granted potential farmers 160 acres of free land westward under the condition they would farm and settle it. However, 160 acres was usually not enough for them to make a living.

Question 5

What were Boomtowns? What was special about them?

Answer 5

• They were quickly created towns created out West to dig for gold and silver in the mountains
• They were quote diverse

Question 6

What were the societal effects of westward expansion from 1865-1898?

Question 7

What was an important meat industry in the new West and how did it come about? What were the name of the people who worked there called?

Answer 7

• Western settlers brought a lot of cattle westward and Cowboys herded these cattle to markets across the plains

Question 8

What hurt the trade of Cowboys and open cattle drives?

Answer 8

• The barbed wire fenses of homesteaders

Question 9

What were sodbusters and how did they get their name and their land?

Answer 9

• Sodbusters were the first to cut through the soil with their plows
• They got their land from the homestead act and railroad companies, who got their land from the government

Question 10

When was the frontier officially considered settled?

Answer 10

• 1890, after Oklahoma was allowed to settled

Question 11

What essay stated that the closing of the frontier was a problem? Who wrote it? Why was it a problem?

Answer 11

• The Significance of the Frontier in American History
• Frederick Jackson Turner
• The frontier diffused tensions in the public
• The frontier eleveled class and social hierarchies by allowing a promise of social mobillity
• He worried that social conflict would emerge as a result

Question 12

Give a timeline of the US’s attempt to solve the “Indian Problem”. Include importance acts and battles.

Answer 12

1. The US creates the reservation system to contain Indian populations in confined regions of land. Many nomadic populations, like the Sioux, resisted.
2. The Sioux Wars ensue, which sees a Sioux victory against the US government.
3. The Government starts to win with the discovery of gold on their lands
4. Indian Approporation Act nullifies all previous treaties and rejects soveigrnegty of Indian populations.
5. This starts another war with Sioux and Comanche, which they lose
6. The Dawes Act abandons Reservation system and allocates 160-acre plots that are given to tribal heads to be farmed. Many of the heads sold land to large companies. Basically destroys the soveirgnegty of tribes
7. The Dawes Act was also part of the Assimilationist movement that tried to critianize Indians
8. Ghost Dance spreads as a form of resistance across the West. The Battle of Wounded Knee sees the US army kill 200 men, women, and children

Question 13

Did the South change after the Civil War?

Answer 13

• In some ways yes, and in some mways no.
• Some cities, such as Atlanta mechanized
• In other ways, such as race-relations, it was mainly the same

Question 14

What was the effect of Plessy v. Ferguson? What were the following laws called?

Answer 14

• It supported segregation under the seperate, but equal doctrine
• This led to Jim Crow laws, which segregated every facet of society
• AAs lost many of the gains won during reconstruction. They could not serve on juries, run for office, and were often killed by Lynch Mobs without trial

Question 15

Which people resisted the conditions in the New South?

Answer 15

• Ida B. Wells: editor of black newspaper in the South that published stories about Lynch Mobs and Jim Crow laws
• Henry Turner: facillitated a society that allowed AAs to settle in Liberia
• Booker T. Washington: Argued that AAs needed to become economically independent to gain equal political rights.

Question 16

What were the techonological innovations of the Gilded Age and their effects?

Answer 16

• Railroads: Allowed for a national market for sales to allow for an economy of mass production and mass consumption. Facilitated by Pacific Railroads Act.
• Steel: The Bessemer Process allowed for the mass production of high quality steel.
• Coal and Oil: Sources of energy for industrialization like in factories and railroads
• Telegraph: Invented in 1844 but became widespread during Gilded age. Communication could travel long distances quickly. Also, connected US and Europe which allowed for an international market for goods like oil, coal, and grain.
• Telephones also did the same thing in the 1880s.
• All of these facilllitated the expansion of industry

Question 17

Define Horizontal Integration and give an example

Answer 17

The practice of buying out competitors until there are no competitors left. Examples are John D. Rokefeller for Standard Oil and Carnegie for Carnegie Steel Compant. Vanderbilt did the same for Steamships and railroads

Question 18

Define Vertical Integration

Answer 18

Controlling the entire supply chain. examples include Carnegie steel

Question 19

What were the two guiding ideas that enabled the formation of powerful monopolies during this time period?

Answer 19

1. Lassez-Faire Economics: Politicians were very anti-governemnt intervention in the economy
2. Social Darwinism: People beleived the harsh reality of the Capitilist system reflected nature and that the concentration of money at the top was a reflection of the quality of those people

Question 20

What was one way in which large companies attempted to mitigate social inequality

Answer 20

They Gospel of Wealth which was practitioned by Andrew Carnegie stated that the rich had a duty to donate to the poor. He donated to many libraries and colleges.

Question 21

What were the conditions in the factories and who worked there?

Answer 21

• Very poor, low wages, long hours, health violations
• Women, men, immigrants, children

Question 22

What were the three actions that could be taken by railroad?

Answer 22

1. Political Action
2. Strikes
3. Slowdowns

Question 23

Give examples of important strikes

Answer 23

• Great Railroad Strike: In response to wage cuts during a recession, many workers went on strike which led to an almost complete shutdown in the railroad business. This led to a lot of violence and 100 people dead. It was also repressed by State and federal troops and led to minimal gains
• Pullman Strike: The pullman company created sleeping cars for trains, and cut wages during a panic. He fired all the union workers that came to bargain, so they went on strike. Additionally, Eugene V. Debs directed his union workers not to work on trains that had pullman cars on them. the strike was broken because federal mail was sent on the trains, and hindering that transport was a crime that sent the leaders to jail.

Question 24

Who were the Kinghts of Labor? What happened to it?

Answer 24

• They were accepting of everybody
• They called for the abolition of trusts and monopolies and the end of child labor
• It was essentially disbanded after the Haymarket bombing. Protesters were protesting peacefully in the Haymarket square when an anarchist threw a bomb in the crowd. This led to a negative asociation of Unions with violence.

Question 25

Define a Trust.

Answer 25

During the Gilded Age, a “trust” referred to a business arrangement where several companies in the same industry transferred their stocks to a board of trustees in exchange for shares in the trust itself. These trustees then consolidated control over the operations of the individual companies, effectively creating a monopoly or near-monopoly within the industry.

Question 26

What was an American Union that wasn’t the Knights of Liberty?

Answer 26

• American Federation of Laborers: A federation of craft workers
• Similar goals to Knights of Labor - higher wages, end fo child labor

Question 27

Where did the immigrants to the US come from and arrive at?

Answer 27

• They were mostly from Western Europe for economic opportunities but there were also others from eastern european countries. This was an east coast phenomenon and they worked in factories
• On the West coast there were mant Chinese Immigrants and lived in cities. They worked on railways and in factories

Question 28

What were tenements?

Answer 28

• They were poorly constructed districts where the working class, many of whom were immigrants, lived in
• They had bad living conditions and disease spread rapidly

Question 29

How did new immigrants change US cities?

Answer 29

• The creation of ethnic enclaves in cities
• Irish immigrants built churches and Jews built Synagouges
• Chinese immigrants built Chinatowns

Question 30

What was one AA migration during this period?

Answer 30

• The Exoduster movement saw ~40,000 AAs move to Kansas and Oklahoma. The successful ones were mostly in cities working as domestic servants or inmanual labor or skilled trades, and the homesteaders were mostly unseccessful due to the poor leftover land

Question 31

Who were nativists? Name one leader and what he argued.

Answer 31

• They thought the growth of the immigrant population was a danger to the native people
• Henery Cabot Lodge, a protestant minister, said that americans were commiting race suicide by allowing “inferior” races into the country

Question 32

What organizations tried to protect the rights of immigrants?

Answer 32

• The American Protective Organization tried to protect the rights of Catholics

Question 33

Defined Social Darwinism

Answer 33

It states that “survival of the fittest” should govern social, economic, and race relations and that social/racial hierarchies are inevitable and not a bad thing.

Question 34

Which groups opposed Immigration?

Answer 34

• Nativists: They beleived American culture would be destroyed by “inferior races”
• Unions: They beleived immigrants were willing to work for so less that it undermined their efforts
• Philisiphers: Under the ideas of Social Darwinism, they beleived that the intermingling of “inferior races” would degrade the gene pool.

Question 35

Define the Chinese Exculsion Act.

Answer 35

• It excluded the immigration of Chinese immigrants to the US

Question 36

Describe an attempt to aleiviate the plight of immigrants.

Answer 36

• Settlement Houses, like the Hull Hosue in Chicago were places where immigrants were taught how to assimilate to American society, so they could advance to high levels of society

Question 37

What was the Middle Class and where were they?

Answer 37

• They were between the executives and the workers, and also ran clerical works and skilled works
• They were called white-collar workers
• They developed during the Gilded Age

Question 38

What was the effect of the growing Middle Class? Include examples

Answer 38

• A growth in leisure time and consumerism
• Examples include P.T Banum circuses and the growth of baseball and American Football

Question 39

Define the Gospel of Wealth. Who participated in it, and what did it result in?

Answer 39

It was the idea that it was the duty of the rich to use their money to decrease social inequality and provide opportunities for the poor. Andrew Carnegie was a major proponent of this.

He supported free public libraries, universities, and concert halls as a result. (Carnegie Hall)

Pheobe Hearst gave away a lot of her money to educate the poor at the same level as the rich.

Question 40

What were some reform movements during this period?

Answer 40

• Socialism was popular among the lower classes
• The Social Gospel stated that Cristian principles should be applied to cure the ills of Society. They particularily beleived the middle class should help the urban poor.
• Utopian Societies like the Oneida Community were socialist societies with the idea of free love which was nice.
• The Temperance and Suffrage Movement started to pick up. The Women’s Christian Temperance & the Anti-Saloon league movement founded in 1874 attempted to combat this

Question 41

What was Adam’s Smith’s the Wealth of Nations?

Answer 41

• It was a book in the 1770s that said that if you let the market be the Invisible hand would allow the market to prosper
• This was applied during this period, but the problem during this period was that monopolies eliminated competition

Question 42

What was the Open Door Policy?

Answer 42

It was a policy created in the latter part of this period that sought give equal trading rights in China to the US by eliminating restrictions on certain ports in china only exporting to certain nations.

Question 43

What was the demographic of the Democrats during this period?

Answer 43

• Southern POV
• Champinoned states rights and racial segregation
• Counter on votes from big city political machines and immigrants
• • Neither party had a strong platform

Question 44

What was the demographic of the Republicans during this period?

Answer 44

• Northerners
• More industrial
• Countes on votes from AAs, the middle class, and protestants
• Neither party had a strong platform

Question 45

What was patronage?

Answer 45

• The practice of rewarding federal jobs to faithful party supporters

Question 46

What was the Sherman Anti_Trust Act

Answer 46

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce.

It was applied well into the early 1900s in period 7