Topics
- 6.1 Contextualizing Period 6
Free Land · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.1, Contextualizing Period 6, sets the scene for 1865 to 1898, the era that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel named the Gilded Age. The market revolution, land won from Mexico, California gold, and a Civil War that strengthened Northern industry set the stage. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, and railroad mileage grew from about 35,000 in 1865 to nearly 167,000 in 1890. As factories and cities grew and immigrants arrived by the millions, the period asked who would share the new wealth and what government owed everyone else.
- 6.2 Westward Expansion: Economic Development
Free Land · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.2, Westward Expansion: Economic Development, covers how railroads, mining, ranching, and farming opened the West from 1862 to about 1890. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 paid railroads in loans and land, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific met in Utah in 1869. The Homestead Act offered 160 acres to settlers, while mining booms, cattle drives, and barbed wire reshaped the plains. Wheat prices fell by about half between 1870 and 1894, and indebted farmers organized in the Grange and the Farmers' Alliances, and Native nations lost land as settlement spread.
- 6.3 Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development
Absolute and Undisturbed · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.3, Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development, covers how settlers, soldiers, and federal policy reshaped the West and its Native nations from 1865 to 1890. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 promised the Lakota the Black Hills, but an 1874 army expedition found gold there, and the Great Sioux War followed, including Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Hunters nearly wiped out the bison, the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up tribal land, and the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 marked the end of armed resistance. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier had shaped American democracy.
- 6.4 The “New South”
Separate as the Fingers · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.4, The “New South”, covers how the South changed and stayed the same after Reconstruction ended in 1877. Henry Grady urged Northern investors to back railroads, cotton mills, and Birmingham iron, but most Southerners still farmed, and sharecropping and crop liens kept them in debt as cotton prices fell by more than half. Segregation and disfranchisement hardened: the Supreme Court limited federal protection in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 and upheld separate railroad cars in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, while poll taxes and literacy tests removed Black voters.
- 6.5 Technological Innovation
The Price of Light · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.5, Technological Innovation, is about the inventions and new methods that powered the Second Industrial Revolution from 1865 to 1898. The telegraph and transatlantic cable linked markets, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and Thomas Edison's laboratory produced a practical electric lamp and the Pearl Street power station, which opened in lower Manhattan in 1882. The Bessemer process let Andrew Carnegie sell steel rails at a fraction of earlier prices, and railroads set standard time in 1883. Cheap steel and electric light changed how Americans worked, built, and lived.
- 6.6 The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
The Price of Light · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.6, The Rise of Industrial Capitalism, covers how huge corporations came to dominate the American economy from the 1860s to the 1890s. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie's steel company cut costs through vertical and horizontal integration and railroad rebates, and by 1879 Standard refined about 90 percent of America's oil. Trusts and holding companies tied firms together, and J. P. Morgan's bank reorganized railroads. Prices fell, but competitors, farmers, and workers paid, and critics called the owners robber barons while admirers called them captains of industry.
- 6.7 Labor in the Gilded Age
Eight Hours for What We Will · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.7, Labor in the Gilded Age, covers how industrial workers organized and employers fought back from 1877 to 1895. Workers faced ten- to twelve-hour days and wage cuts in the depressions after 1873 and 1893, so they struck in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and joined the Knights of Labor, which reached about 700,000 members in 1886 and shrank after Haymarket. Samuel Gompers's American Federation of Labor focused on wages and hours and survived. At Homestead in 1892 and Pullman in 1894, troops and courts sided with owners.
- 6.8 Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age
Mother of Exiles · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.8, Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age, covers the more than 12 million immigrants who came to the United States from 1865 to 1898 and the Americans who moved within the country. Through the 1880s most came from Germany, Ireland, Britain, and Scandinavia, and by the mid-1890s most came from southern and eastern Europe, pushed by poor land and persecution and pulled by jobs and letters from relatives. Many entered at Castle Garden or, after 1892, Ellis Island and settled in crowded tenements and ethnic neighborhoods. Farm families and Black Southerners also moved to cities.
- 6.9 Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age
Mother of Exiles · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.9, Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age, covers how Americans restricted, resisted, and tried to reshape the millions who arrived between 1865 and 1898. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first major federal law to restrict immigration by nationality, and renewed it in the Geary Act of 1892. Nativists organized the American Protective Association in 1887 and the Immigration Restriction League in 1894, and Social Darwinism gave their ideas a scientific sound. Jane Addams opened Hull-House in 1889, and in 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark confirmed birthright citizenship.
- 6.10 Development of the Middle Class
Looking Backward · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.10, Development of the Middle Class, covers how corporations and cities created a large group of salaried managers, clerks, and professionals from about 1870 to 1900. Offices needed bookkeepers and stenographers, and women filled many typewriter jobs. Public schools, land-grant colleges, and Black colleges trained workers, while electric streetcars such as Frank Sprague's line in Richmond in 1888 let families live in suburbs. Department stores like Macy's, mail-order catalogs from Montgomery Ward and Sears, and magazines built a consumer culture, though store clerks and domestic servants earned little.
- 6.11 Reform in the Gilded Age
Looking Backward · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.11, Reform in the Gilded Age, covers how Americans defended and challenged the new industrial order from about 1870 to 1898. Andrew Carnegie's 1889 essay, later called the Gospel of Wealth, told the rich to give their fortunes away in their lifetimes, and he funded libraries. Critics wanted deeper change: Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) proposed a single tax on land, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) imagined a planned economy, and Social Gospel ministers urged churches to fix wages and housing. Women led through the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, women's clubs, suffrage groups, and the National Association of Colored Women.
- 6.12 Controversies over the Role of Government in the Gilded Age
Cross of Gold · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.12, Controversies over the Role of Government in the Gilded Age, covers the fight over how far government should regulate business and manage money from 1877 to 1896. Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 and passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, but courts and weak enforcement limited both. Debtor farmers demanded more money through greenbacks and free silver, and in 1892 they formed the People's Party at Omaha. After the Panic of 1893, William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech won the Democrats for silver, and William McKinley won the 1896 election.
- 6.13 Politics in the Gilded Age
Cross of Gold · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.13, Politics in the Gilded Age, covers party politics from the 1870s to the 1890s, when Republicans and Democrats were evenly matched and rarely passed major laws. Turnout was high, elections were close, and in 1876 and 1888 the winner lost the popular vote. City machines like Tammany Hall traded jobs and services for votes, the Tweed Ring stole millions, and the spoils system filled federal jobs with party loyalists. After President Garfield's assassination in 1881, the Pendleton Act of 1883 put some federal jobs under merit exams. In 1884 Grover Cleveland won the presidency by carrying New York by about a thousand votes.
- 6.14 Continuity and Change in Period 6
The White City · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 6.14, Continuity and Change in Period 6, weighs how much industrialization changed the United States from 1865 to 1898. Railroad track tripled between 1870 and 1890, steel output grew more than fiftyfold, cities swelled with immigrants, and wage work spread. In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the end of the frontier, noted in the 1890 census, closed the first period of American history. Much of the evidence points instead to the railroad, the factory, and the city as the main forces of change, though race, sex, and conquest still decided who shared in power.
Key terms
- Transcontinental railroad
- Topic 6.1
The first rail line across the American West, joining Omaha and Sacramento. It was finished on May 10, 1869, when the Central Pacific (building east) met the Union Pacific (building west) at Promontory Summit, Utah. A trip that took months by wagon now took about a week.
- Pacific Railway Act (1862)
- Topic 6.1
The law that paid for the transcontinental railroad. For every mile of track, Congress gave the companies federal loans (bonds) plus alternating square miles of public land along the route, and doubled the land in 1864. More track meant more money, so both companies raced.
- Telegraph
- Topic 6.1
A way to send messages as electric clicks along a wire, in Morse code. The first line across the continent opened in 1861. News that once took weeks now took seconds, which is why the whole country could 'hear' this ceremony.
- Homestead Act (1862)
- Topic 6.1
A law that let a citizen claim 160 acres of western public land for a small filing fee, and keep it after living on it and farming it for five years. Congress passed it the same year as the Pacific Railway Act.
- Contextualization
- Topic 6.1
Showing how a development fits into the bigger picture around it. Ask: what came earlier that helps explain this?
- Industrial capitalism
- Topic 6.1
An economy of big, machine-driven industries, paid for by investors and selling to national markets. In the Gilded Age, railroads, steel mills and mines led the way.
- Standard time
- Topic 6.1
One official clock time for a whole region. Before 1883, every town set noon by its own sun. That day the railroads split the country into four time zones, and Congress made them law in 1918.
- Gilded Age
- Topic 6.1
Twain and Warner's 1873 title, later used for the years 1865–1898: gold-plated glitter on top, with the problems of farmers, workers and cities festering underneath.
- Land grant
- Topic 6.2
Public land the government gave a railroad, in alternate square-mile sections along the track. The railroad sold it to raise money and to draw settlers.
- Panic of 1873
- Topic 6.2
A financial crash set off when Jay Cooke & Company, a bank that sold railroad bonds, failed. It began a depression that lasted into 1879.
- Placer mining
- Topic 6.2
Washing loose gold out of stream gravel with a pan or a shovel. It took almost no money, so one person could do it. The deep mines that came next took companies and investors.
- Comstock Lode
- Topic 6.2
A huge deposit of silver and gold under Virginia City, Nevada, found in 1859. Its mines produced about $306 million by 1881, and the boom helped Nevada become a state in 1864.
- Mining Law of 1872
- Topic 6.2
Federal law that lets U.S. citizens stake a claim on public land and mine it. The miner pays the government nothing for the ore. Still the basic law for hard-rock mining on federal land.
- Boomtown
- Topic 6.2
A town that appeared almost overnight around a mineral strike. Some grew into cities, like Denver. Some emptied out when the ore did and became ghost towns.
- Long drive
- Topic 6.2
Herds of Texas cattle walked hundreds of miles north to Kansas railroad towns, where they were sold and shipped east (about 1866–1886). The railroad made the drive worth the walk.
- Vaquero
- Topic 6.2
A Mexican horseman and cattle herder. Texas cowboys borrowed the vaquero’s methods, gear and vocabulary when the cattle business moved north.
- Cow town
- Topic 6.2
A town where a railroad met the cattle trails, like Abilene and Dodge City. Stockyards, buyers, hotels and saloons grew up around the herds, and the town lived on the trade.
- Barbed wire
- Topic 6.2
Cheap fence wire with sharp barbs, made practical by Joseph Glidden’s 1874 patent. It let farmers and ranchers fence the treeless plains and ended the open range.
- Open range
- Topic 6.2
Unfenced public grassland where ranchers turned their cattle loose to graze and rounded them up each spring. Owners had the cattle but not the grass. Overgrazing, wire and two hard winters ended it.
- Homestead Act
- Topic 6.2
An 1862 law that let a citizen, or an immigrant who had filed to become one, claim 160 acres of public land and own it after five years of living on it and farming it.
- Great American Desert
- Topic 6.2
The nickname early explorers and pioneers gave the dry Great Plains west of about the 100th meridian. In the 1870s, promoters worked to erase it.
- Mechanization
- Topic 6.2
Replacing hand labor with machines. Steel plows, reapers and binders let one farm family grow far more wheat, which raised output and pushed prices down.
- Deflation
- Topic 6.2
A general fall in prices. Farmers with fixed debts had to repay in dollars that were harder to earn.
- Bonanza farm
- Topic 6.2
A giant wheat farm of thousands of acres, run by a hired manager and hired crews with the newest machines. Bonanza farms were an early case of consolidation in agriculture.
- mortgage
- Topic 6.2
A loan that puts the farm up as security. If the family can't pay, the lender can take the land.
- grain elevator
- Topic 6.2
A tall storehouse beside the tracks where grain was weighed, graded, stored and loaded onto railroad cars. Many stations had only one.
- middlemen
- Topic 6.2
The buyers, graders and shippers who stand between a farmer and the final customer. Each one takes a cut.
- The Grange
- Topic 6.2
Short for the Patrons of Husbandry, a national farmers' organization founded in 1867. It began as a social club for isolated farm families. After the Panic of 1873 it became a force for cooperatives and railroad regulation.
- Cooperative
- Topic 6.2
A business owned and run by its members. Grange and Alliance farmers pooled their money to buy supplies in bulk and to store and sell grain, trying to cut out middlemen and win better prices. Many failed for lack of capital and management.
- Munn v. Illinois (1877)
- Topic 6.2
The Supreme Court upheld an Illinois Granger law that capped what grain elevators could charge. Chief Justice Waite held that property 'clothed with a public interest' can be regulated by the state. Illinois was one of four states whose Granger laws capped railroad and elevator rates.
- Farmers' Alliance
- Topic 6.2
Farmers' organizations of the 1880s and early 1890s that grew from Texas across the South and onto the plains. They sent out traveling lecturers, built bigger cooperatives, and pressed for changes in money, credit and railroad policy. The Colored Farmers' Alliance was a separate organization for Black farmers.
- Ocala Demands
- Topic 6.2
The program the National Farmers' Alliance adopted at Ocala, Florida, in December 1890. It called for the subtreasury plan (federal loans to farmers on their stored crops), more money in circulation, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and land taken back from the railroads. The Populists would carry it into their platform.
- National Economist
- Topic 6.2
The Farmers' Alliance's national weekly newspaper, published in Washington, D.C. It carried the Alliance's case on railroads, credit and money to farm families across the South and the Plains.
- Separate Car Act (Louisiana, 1890)
- Topic 6.4
Required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races.” A passenger who sat in the wrong car faced a $25 fine or up to 20 days in the parish prison.
- Test case
- Topic 6.4
A case brought on purpose to make a court rule on a law. Someone breaks the law in plain view, is charged, and argues that the law itself is unconstitutional.
- Redeemers
- Topic 6.4
Southern Democrats who took back state governments as Reconstruction ended. They cut taxes, schools and spending, courted Northern investors, and used race to hold white voters together.
- New South
- Topic 6.4
Henry Grady’s name for a South rebuilt on industry, railroads and Northern investment, at peace with the North, and left alone to run its own racial order.
- National rail network
- Topic 6.4
Rail lines joined into one connected system. After 1886 Southern track matched Northern width, so freight cars could roll north and south without being unloaded and reloaded.
- Convict leasing
- Topic 6.4
States and counties rented prisoners, overwhelmingly Black and often jailed for minor offenses, to mines, railroads and plantations. Alabama kept it until 1928.
- Tenant farming
- Topic 6.4
Renting land and paying the owner in cash or a set share of the crop. Tenants usually owned their own mule and tools.
- Crop-lien system
- Topic 6.4
Merchants sold food, seed and supplies on credit and took a legal claim (a lien) on the farmer's next crop. Credit prices ran high, so a bad harvest or a low cotton price left the farmer still owing.
- Colored Farmers' Alliance (1886)
- Topic 6.4
A cooperative movement of Black farmers, about 250,000 strong by 1890. Its story continues in the Populist years.
- Civil Rights Cases (1883)
- Topic 6.4
An 8–1 Supreme Court ruling (Oct. 15, 1883) that Congress could not ban discrimination by private businesses such as hotels, theaters and railroads. The 14th Amendment, the Court said, limits states, not private owners. Federal protection weakened, and segregation spread.
- Jim Crow laws
- Topic 6.4
State and local laws that segregated Black Americans in public life, from the 1880s into the 1960s. The name came from a blackface stage act of about 1828. Segregated “Jim Crow cars” were already running on Massachusetts railroads by 1841.
- Poll tax
- Topic 6.4
A fee a person had to pay in order to vote. Mississippi's 1890 constitution set it at two dollars a year, a lot of cash for a poor sharecropper. It kept many poor Black voters, and many poor white voters, from the polls.
- Literacy test
- Topic 6.4
A test of reading, or of "understanding" a passage, that a voter had to pass before registering. Registrars decided who passed, so they could fail Black applicants and pass white ones. Together with poll taxes, these tests kept most Black men in Mississippi from voting.
- Disfranchisement
- Topic 6.4
Taking away the right to vote. After 1890, Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests and lists of disqualifying crimes to remove most Black voters, without ever naming race in the law.
- Memphis exodus and boycott (1892)
- Topic 6.4
After the lynchings, Black Memphians protested by leaving the city or refusing to ride the streetcars. The streetcar company's officers came to the Free Speech office to ask for their riders back.
- Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)
- Topic 6.4
Black journalist who counted lynchings from white newspapers and published the findings in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895). Her sources: the Chicago Tribune's yearly tallies, compiled by white reporters from white newspapers.
- Lynching
- Topic 6.4
A killing by a mob that takes the law into its own hands, with no trial. In the South most victims were Black, and few killers were ever charged.
- Southern Horrors (1892)
- Topic 6.4
Wells's pamphlet, written in exile in New York. It used newspaper reports to argue that the charge of rape was an excuse for lynching, not the reason.
- Tuskegee Institute (1881)
- Topic 6.4
Alabama school for Black students that opened on July 4, 1881, with Washington as its first principal. It taught trades and farming, and its students built much of the campus themselves.
- George Washington Carver
- Topic 6.4
Tuskegee scientist, on the faculty from October 1896, who urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans instead of only cotton.
- International Migration Society (1894)
- Topic 6.4
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner’s plan to help Black Southerners emigrate to Liberia. Its first ship, the Horsa, left Savannah on March 19, 1895, with about 200 emigrants. Washington told those who hoped to better their condition “in a foreign land” to cast down their buckets at home.
- Atlanta Compromise (1895)
- Topic 6.4
Washington’s bargain, as critics later named it: Black Southerners would accept segregation for now and focus on work and education, while white Southerners would support Black schools and jobs.
- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
- Topic 6.4
Supreme Court decision, 7–1, that upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate railroad cars for white and Black passengers. It let states require segregation (Jim Crow) as long as the separate facilities were “equal.”
- “Separate but equal”
- Topic 6.4
The rule from Plessy: a state may require racial segregation if the separate facilities are equal. In practice they almost never were.
- Scientific racism
- Topic 6.4
Claims dressed as science that races had fixed, ranked traits. It was used to justify segregation, disfranchisement and immigration limits.
- Williams v. Mississippi (1898)
- Topic 6.4
The Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's poll tax and literacy test. The laws never named race, and the Court held that was enough, though the state's own supreme court had said what they were for.
- Grandfather clause
- Topic 6.4
A rule that let men skip voting tests if their father or grandfather could vote before a set date. Louisiana chose 1867, before Black men had the vote, so nearly every white man was exempt and almost no Black man was.
- Wilmington coup (1898)
- Topic 6.4
On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists forced Wilmington's elected officials out and took over the city government. Once called a race riot, it was a planned overthrow, and historians now call it a coup.
- The New South: what changed
- Topic 6.4
Railroads joined to the national network. Iron furnaces, textile mills and tobacco factories. Growing cities. Northern investment.
- The New South: what stayed
- Topic 6.4
Cotton. Sharecropping and tenancy. Debt. White political control, now written into law.
- National Association of Colored Women (1896)
- Topic 6.4
A national federation of Black women's clubs, formed in Washington, D.C. in July 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Its motto: “Lifting as We Climb.”
- Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
- Topic 6.4
The Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 ruling against school segregation: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It rejected “separate but equal” for public education.
- Central station
- Topic 6.5
A power plant that makes electricity for many customers and sends it to them through wires under the street. Edison's Pearl Street plant, opened in 1882, worked this way.
- Investment bank
- Topic 6.5
A bank that raises money for big businesses by selling their stocks and bonds to investors. Bankers like J. P. Morgan's firm financed Edison's electric company.
- Second Industrial Revolution
- Topic 6.5
The wave of new technology from the 1870s on, in steel, oil, electricity and refrigeration, that let American firms make far more goods, far more cheaply.
- Captains of industry / robber barons
- Topic 6.5
Two names for the same rich industrialists. Admirers said they built the country's factories and railroads. Critics said they got rich by bribes, rigged deals and low wages.
- Patent
- Topic 6.5
A government grant giving an inventor sole rights to an invention for seventeen years. It rewarded inventing with a temporary monopoly.
- Connection: Morse's telegraph (Topic 4.5) → the patent boom
- Topic 6.5
Skill 5.B. Morse's telegraph (Topic 4.5, the Market Revolution) showed that a wire could carry news faster than a rider. Patents rewarded whoever built the next link, so the wire led to the ocean cable, the telephone and the lamp.
- Telephone
- Topic 6.5
Alexander Graham Bell's device (patented March 7, 1876) that sends the human voice over a wire as a varying electric current. It joined the telegraph and the ocean cable in the new communication networks.
- Research laboratory
- Topic 6.5
A team paid to invent on schedule, for profit. Edison's Menlo Park lab (1876) paid machinists and experimenters to work on his ideas, and it kept a pipe organ for the midnight lunches.
- Incandescent lamp
- Topic 6.5
A lamp that makes light by heating a thin filament until it glows inside a glass bulb with the air pumped out. Edison's high-resistance filament let many lamps share one power source.
- Alternating current
- Topic 6.5
Electric current that reverses direction many times a second. Transformers can raise its voltage for long-distance lines, so it could travel for miles. Edison's direct current could not.
- Corporation
- Topic 6.5
A business owned by stockholders and run by hired managers. Owners risk only what they invest. Railroads needed the form because no family could pay for a whole line.
- Watered stock
- Topic 6.5
Stock sold for far more than the company's real assets are worth. Buyers pay for value that isn't there.
- Rebate
- Topic 6.5
A secret refund from a railroad to a favored shipper, so the biggest customer paid less than everyone else.
- Pool
- Topic 6.5
An agreement among competing companies, here railroads, to split traffic and fix rates.
- Connection: Lowell's mill hands
- Topic 6.5
Topic 4.5: the same job Lowell's youngest mill hands held, swapping full bobbins for empty ones on the spinning frames. Same work, a generation later. (Skill 5.B)
- Bessemer process
- Topic 6.5
Blasting air through molten iron to burn out the carbon. It made steel in about twenty minutes. Older methods took hours or days.
- Andrew Carnegie
- Topic 6.5
Scottish-born steelmaker who built the largest steel company in the United States by cutting costs and controlling his supply. He later gave away most of his fortune.
- Protective tariff
- Topic 6.5
A tax on imports meant to shield American makers from foreign competition. One of the pro-growth government policies of the Gilded Age.
- Kerosene
- Topic 6.6
Lamp fuel refined from crude oil. It cost less than whale oil, so ordinary families could afford light after dark.
- Standard Oil (1870)
- Topic 6.6
Refining company John D. Rockefeller and his partners incorporated in Cleveland on January 10, 1870, with $1 million in capital. Within a decade it controlled most of U.S. oil refining.
- Context
- Topic 6.6
Oil swung from boom to bust: too many wells, too many small refiners, prices that crashed without warning. Context explains why a person acted. It doesn't settle whether the act was right.
- Drawback
- Topic 6.6
Here, a payment a railroad made to the South Improvement Company out of the freight its rivals paid. A rebate cut a member's own rate. A drawback paid the member part of a rival's.
- Vertical integration
- Topic 6.6
One company controls every stage of making a product, from raw material to finished goods. Example: Carnegie Steel's mines, ore ships, railroad and mills.
- Horizontal integration
- Topic 6.6
One company takes control of its competitors at the same stage of production, until it dominates the whole industry. Example: Standard Oil buying Cleveland's refineries.
- Consolidation
- Topic 6.6
Merging many separate businesses into one large company, to cut costs and end competition between them.
- Trust
- Topic 6.6
Stockholders of many companies hand their shares to one board of trustees, which runs them all as one.
- Holding company
- Topic 6.6
A corporation formed to own a controlling share of other corporations' stock. New Jersey allowed it in 1889.
- Interlocking directorates
- Topic 6.6
The same people sitting on the boards of competing companies.
- Refrigerated railroad car
- Topic 6.6
A freight car cooled with blocks of ice in its roof, so fresh meat could travel for days without spoiling.
- Brand name
- Topic 6.6
One company name, sold nationally with advertising, so buyers trust it anywhere.
- Reciprocity Treaty (1875)
- Topic 6.6
A treaty that let Hawaiian sugar into the United States duty-free, and American goods into Hawaii the same way.
- Guano Islands Act (1856)
- Topic 6.6
A law that let Americans claim islands with guano nobody else held, and treated them as U.S. possessions.
- Captains of industry
- Topic 6.6
A name for business leaders seen as builders who made goods cheaper and the economy bigger. Thomas Carlyle used it in Past and Present (1843). Later writers used it as praise for America's tycoons.
- Robber barons
- Topic 6.6
A critics' name for rich business leaders who won through pressure, secret deals and swindles. The Atlantic Monthly made the comparison in 1870. Matthew Josephson's 1934 book, The Robber Barons, made the name stick.
- Connection: bobbin boy → steel mill
- Topic 6.6
Showing how one development relates to another. Carnegie started in a cotton mill, the kind of factory the Market Revolution built. At Braddock, that model reached a scale no 1830s mill owner could have pictured.
- Pinkertons
- Topic 6.7
Armed guards and detectives from a private agency that companies hired to protect property and break strikes.
- Lockout
- Topic 6.7
An employer shuts workers out of the workplace to force them to accept terms, or to break their union.
- Homestead Strike (1892)
- Topic 6.7
The 1892 lockout and strike at Carnegie Steel's Homestead, Pennsylvania mill. A battle between workers and hired Pinkerton guards made it one of the most famous clashes between labor and management of the Gilded Age.
- Wage earner
- Topic 6.7
A worker paid wages by an employer, by the hour, day or piece, instead of working for themselves. By 1900, about two of every three employed Americans.
- Real wages
- Topic 6.7
Wages measured by what they can buy. When prices fall while pay holds steady, real wages rise, even if the paycheck looks the same.
- Standard of living
- Topic 6.7
How well people live, judged by what their income buys: food, clothing, housing, goods. It rose for many Americans in these years, while the gap between rich and poor grew.
- Child labor
- Topic 6.7
Regular paid work by children, common in mines, mills and factories. Its numbers and share rose after 1870; by 1900 about 1.75 million children aged 10–15 were at work.
- Great Railroad Strike of 1877
- Topic 6.7
The first nationwide strike. It began when Baltimore and Ohio crews walked out over a wage cut. Other workers joined them, and federal troops helped end it.
- State militia
- Topic 6.7
Part-time citizen soldiers under a governor's command. In 1877, governors sent militia against strikers. If the militia couldn't or wouldn't act, a governor could ask the president for federal troops.
- Federal troops
- Topic 6.7
U.S. Army soldiers under the president's command. In 1877, governors asked for help, and Hayes sent troops to several states, including West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was the first time since the 1830s that a president used federal troops to end a labor dispute.
- National Labor Union (1866)
- Topic 6.7
The first national labor federation. It won an eight-hour day for federal workers in 1868, then faded away in the depression that began in 1873.
- Colored National Labor Union (1869)
- Topic 6.7
A national labor organization formed by Black workers in 1869 because most white unions would not admit them. Isaac Myers of Baltimore was its president.
- Knights of Labor
- Topic 6.7
A national union, secret until 1881, that welcomed almost anyone who worked, skilled or not. It wanted cooperatives, an eight-hour day, and arbitration instead of strikes.
- Craft union
- Topic 6.7
A union of skilled workers in one trade, like cigar makers or carpenters. Members paid high dues that funded strike pay and benefits.
- Anarchism
- Topic 6.7
The belief that all government should be abolished. Some Chicago anarchists, many of them German and Czech immigrants, called for revolution, even by force.
- Haymarket affair (1886)
- Topic 6.7
A bomb thrown at a Chicago labor rally killed police officers and others. Eight anarchist leaders were convicted, though the bomb thrower was never identified.
- American Federation of Labor (AFL)
- Topic 6.7
A federation of craft unions founded in 1886. It organized skilled workers trade by trade and focused on wages, hours and working conditions.
- Collective bargaining
- Topic 6.7
Workers negotiating with an employer as one group, through their union, over wages, hours and working conditions.
- Las Gorras Blancas
- Topic 6.7
The "White Caps": Hispano villagers in New Mexico who, around 1889–1891, cut fences and burned railroad ties to stop land companies from closing off common lands.
- Strikebreakers
- Topic 6.7
Workers hired to take the jobs of strikers so a company can keep running through a strike.
- Panic of 1893
- Topic 6.7
A financial crash that began in 1893 and set off a depression. Banks and railroads failed, factories cut wages or closed, and millions of Americans lost their jobs.
- American Railway Union
- Topic 6.7
An industrial union: one union for every kind of railroad worker, skilled or not. By its own 1894 vote, white workers only.
- Boycott
- Topic 6.7
Refusing to buy, handle or work with a company's goods or services, as a way to pressure it. Here, ARU members refused to switch or move trains that carried Pullman cars.
- Injunction
- Topic 6.7
A court order to stop doing something. After 1894, employers used injunctions to break strikes.
- In re Debs (1895)
- Topic 6.7
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the injunction against the Pullman boycott, on the federal government's power over interstate commerce and the mails.
- Laissez-faire
- Topic 6.7
The idea that government should leave the economy alone. Even so, judges and troops protected employers' property and contracts, which in a strike usually meant siding with the employer.
- Argumentation (AP skill 6.C)
- Topic 6.7
Explain how pieces of evidence relate to each other: which one supports another, which one complicates it. Words like because, but, while and so do that work.
- Progressive Era
- Topic 6.7
Roughly 1890–1920, when reformers pushed government to deal with the problems of industrial life: unsafe work, child labor, powerful corporations, crowded cities.
- Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)
- Topic 6.7
The federal law that set a national minimum wage, required overtime pay after 40 hours a week (phased in by 1940), and limited child labor.
- Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
- Topic 6.8
The first federal law to bar immigrants because of their nationality. It suspended Chinese labor immigration for ten years. Congress renewed it in 1892, extended it without an end date, and did not repeal it until 1943.
- Naturalization
- Topic 6.8
The legal process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Since 1790 it had been limited to "free white persons" (Africans were added in 1870). Section 14 of the 1882 act named the Chinese and shut them out.
- Statue of Liberty (1886)
- Topic 6.8
Liberty Enlightening the World: a gift from the people of France, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi with an iron frame by Gustave Eiffel, and dedicated on Bedloe's Island on October 28, 1886. Americans raised the money for the pedestal.
- Push and pull factors
- Topic 6.8
The forces that pushed people to leave home (poverty, crop failure, persecution, army service) and the ones that pulled them to the United States (factory wages, cheap farmland, railroad and steamship company recruiting).
- Mass-circulation newspapers
- Topic 6.8
Cheap, high-volume papers of the 1880s and 1890s, like Pulitzer's World, that used crusades and human-interest stories to reach working-class and immigrant readers.
- "The New Colossus"
- Topic 6.8
Emma Lazarus's 1883 sonnet, written to raise money for the pedestal. It was not placed on the pedestal until 1903, and only later did Americans read it as a welcome to immigrants.
- Suffrage
- Topic 6.8
The right to vote. In 1886 most American women could not vote in national elections, and suffragists used public events like this one to demand it.
- Statue of Liberty
- Topic 6.8
Liberty Enlightening the World: a gift from France, dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886 and paid for on the American side by public donations. Over time it became a symbol of welcome to immigrants.
- “Old” and “new” immigrants
- Topic 6.8
Historians’ labels for a shift in origins. “Old” immigrants came mostly from northern and western Europe, the majority through the 1880s. “New” immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, the majority by the mid-1890s, and more of them were Catholic, Orthodox or Jewish.
- Push factors
- Topic 6.8
Conditions that drove people out: poverty, landlessness, overcrowding, religious persecution, military conscription, and no chance to rise.
- Birds of passage
- Topic 6.8
Migrants, mostly young men, who came to work for a season or a few years and went home with their savings.
- Pull factors and chain migration
- Topic 6.8
Pull factors drew people in: jobs, wages, freedom to worship, and relatives already here. In chain migration, one family member went first, then sent money or prepaid tickets for the next.
- Internal migration
- Topic 6.8
Movement within a country. In these years: farm families moving to cities, and Black Southerners moving from the rural South to Southern and Northern cities.
- Public charge
- Topic 6.8
A person likely to depend on public money. The Immigration Act of 1882, the first general federal immigration law, barred anyone likely to become one. The phrase is still in U.S. law today.
- Ellis Island
- Topic 6.8
The federal government's immigration station in New York harbor, opened January 1, 1892. Doctors and inspectors examined arrivals there, and nearly all were admitted.
- Ship's manifest
- Topic 6.8
The passenger list each steamship had to complete before arrival, with every immigrant's answers to the questions set by law in 1893. Inspectors checked the answers.
- Castle Garden
- Topic 6.8
New York State's immigration station at the southern tip of Manhattan, 1855–1890. It handled about three-quarters of all U.S. immigrants in those years, until the federal government took over.
- Foran Act (Alien Contract Labor Law), 1885
- Topic 6.8
Made it illegal to bring immigrants to the United States under a labor contract signed abroad. Backed by the Knights of Labor, who feared wage-cutting and strikebreakers.
- Dumbbell tenement
- Topic 6.8
A five- or six-story New York tenement built after the 1879 law, pinched in the middle around a narrow air shaft so every room had a “window.” The shafts brought little light and carried noise, smells and fire.
- Ethnic neighborhood (enclave)
- Topic 6.8
A city district where one immigrant group clustered, keeping its language, faith, food and organizations. Crowded and poor, but also a base for jobs, credit and politics.
- Mutual-aid society
- Topic 6.8
A club of immigrants, often from the same town or region, that pooled dues to pay for sickness, burial, loans and help finding work.
- Ward boss
- Topic 6.8
A city machine’s neighborhood fixer: a job, a bucket of coal, and a favor now for a vote in November. More in Cross of Gold.
- Assimilation
- Topic 6.8
Taking on the language, dress and customs of the new country. Most immigrants negotiated a compromise, keeping some old ways and adopting some new ones.
- Page Act (1875)
- Topic 6.9
Barred women brought to the U.S. "for lewd and immoral purposes," and forced-contract laborers, from Asia. Officials used it to keep out most Chinese women, so Chinese America stayed mostly male for decades.
- Workingmen's Party of California
- Topic 6.9
Founded in San Francisco in 1877, in a depression. Its slogan blamed Chinese workers for low wages. It helped put anti-Chinese clauses into California's 1879 constitution and pushed both national parties to act.
- Geary Act (1892)
- Topic 6.9
Extended Chinese exclusion ten more years and required Chinese laborers to register and carry a certificate of residence or be deported. The Supreme Court upheld it in Fong Yue Ting (1893).
- Social Darwinism
- Topic 6.9
Applying “survival of the fittest” to society: the rich are the fittest, so charity and reform interfere with nature. Nobody used the label then; historian Richard Hofstadter popularized it in 1944.
- Nativism
- Topic 6.9
Hostility to immigrants and a preference for native-born, often Protestant, Americans. The APA (founded 1887) targeted Catholics; it claimed millions of members and denied the published oaths.
- Immigration Restriction League
- Topic 6.9
Boston group founded in 1894 to cut immigration, mainly from southern and eastern Europe. Its main tool was a literacy test.
- Settlement house
- Topic 6.9
A house in a poor immigrant district where college-educated residents lived and ran classes, clubs, child care and baths, and studied local conditions to push for reform.
- Municipal reform
- Topic 6.9
Citizen campaigns to make city government deliver basic services: clean streets, garbage collection, safe housing and inspectors who do their jobs.
- Americanization
- Topic 6.9
The push to make immigrants adopt American language, dress, habits and civic values. Reformers offered real help, but often expected newcomers to give up their old ways.
- Sweatshop
- Topic 6.9
A crowded workshop or tenement flat where workers, often women and children, sewed for long hours at very low pay. Reformers like Kelley pushed states to inspect and limit them.
- United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)
- Topic 6.9
Supreme Court case ruling that a child born in the United States to Chinese parents is a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, even though the law barred those parents from ever becoming citizens.
- Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
- Topic 6.9
Its first sentence makes everyone born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, a citizen. Ratified after the Civil War to secure citizenship for freed people.
- Birthright citizenship
- Topic 6.9
Citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment whatever the parents' nationality. Confirmed for the children of Chinese immigrants in Wong Kim Ark (1898). Exceptions: children of diplomats and of enemy occupiers, and of members of Native nations owing tribal allegiance.
- Utopian novel
- Topic 6.10
A story set in an imagined perfect society, written to criticize the real one. Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) pictures a peaceful, orderly America in the year 2000 next to the Gilded Age he wanted to fix.
- Nationalism (Bellamy's)
- Topic 6.10
Bellamy's program: the nation owns all industry as one great corporation and gives every citizen an equal share of what it produces. He called it Nationalism, not socialism, and his followers took the name.
- Nationalist clubs
- Topic 6.10
Local clubs, the first founded in Boston in December 1888, that campaigned for Bellamy's ideas. Here 'Nationalist' means national ownership of industry, not patriotism. There were over 150 by 1890.
- New middle class
- Topic 6.10
The growing group of salaried white-collar workers, such as clerks, typists, teachers and managers, who worked with paper and people instead of tools and earned salaries instead of wages. Corporations created most of these jobs.
- Middle class
- Topic 6.10
The growing group between the rich and the poor: salaried managers, clerks, salespeople and engineers, plus the doctors, lawyers and storekeepers who served them. After 1870, corporations, schools and colleges made it grow fast.
- White-collar (salaried) workers
- Topic 6.10
Employees paid a salary, a set sum for the job instead of a wage for the hour, whose work generally isn’t manual. By 1910 they held more than a fourth of all nonfarm jobs. The name itself only appeared around 1910, so nobody in these pictures used it.
- Feminization of an occupation
- Topic 6.10
When women become the majority in a line of work. Jobs that did, such as teaching, nursing and clerical work, usually lost status and paid lower wages and salaries.
- Morrill Acts (1862, 1890)
- Topic 6.10
Federal laws granting land to states to fund colleges of agriculture and engineering. The 1890 act withheld money from states that barred Black students unless they also funded separate colleges for them.
- Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)
- Topic 6.10
Colleges founded to educate African Americans, most of them after the Civil War, when nearly all white colleges refused to admit them. Fisk, Howard, Morehouse and Meharry Medical College are examples.
- Streetcar suburb
- Topic 6.10
A neighborhood at the edge of a city, built along an electric streetcar line. It let workers live miles from their jobs.
- Restrictive covenant
- Topic 6.10
A clause in a deed that bars an owner from selling or renting to certain groups. In plain words: this land may never go to anyone who is not white. Developers began writing them in the late 1800s, and they spread widely after 1900.
- Domestic service
- Topic 6.10
Paid household work such as cooking, cleaning and laundry. In 1890 it was the most common paid job for American women, and immigrant women did much of it in Northern cities.
- Consumer culture
- Topic 6.10
A way of life built around buying goods and paying for leisure, made possible by mass production, salaries, streetcars and advertising.
- Department store
- Topic 6.10
A large store selling many kinds of goods under one roof, at prices marked on each item. R. H. Macy in New York and Marshall Field in Chicago made it popular in the late 1800s, and shopping became a favorite pastime.
- Mail-order catalog
- Topic 6.10
A thick book of goods that companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck mailed to customers, mostly farm families, who ordered by mail and got their goods by rail. Sears’s catalog became famous as the “wish book.”
- Advertising
- Topic 6.10
Paid promotion of brand-name goods. In the 1880s and 1890s, advertisers’ money let magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal sell for as little as ten cents a copy, and it helped make shopping a favorite pastime.
- Consumers’ League (1891)
- Topic 6.10
A New York group of shoppers and working women that used buying power as a reform tool. Its White List named stores that paid fair wages and gave workers seats and reasonable hours. It is an example of women’s voluntary organizations pushing for social reform.
- Acres of Diamonds
- Topic 6.11
Russell Conwell’s famous lecture, which he gave more than 6,000 times from the 1870s on. He told ordinary Americans that opportunity lay close at hand and that getting rich honestly was a Christian duty. Its message that riches reward hard work matched the age’s belief in self-improvement.
- Gospel of Wealth
- Topic 6.11
Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 argument that great fortunes come from competition, which is hard on individuals but good for humanity (“the race”). He said a rich man should live plainly and give his surplus away for the public good during his own lifetime, through libraries, universities and parks. It gave the fortunes of the Gilded Age a moral duty.
- Philanthropy
- Topic 6.11
Giving money to improve public life, through libraries, schools, universities, hospitals and parks. Late-1800s millionaires like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Stanford practiced it on a huge scale, and Carnegie called it a rich person’s duty.
- Charity vs. reform
- Topic 6.11
Charity helps people bear a hardship, and reform changes the conditions that cause it. Critics of the Gospel of Wealth said giving could not replace fair wages or a fairer economy. Bellamy’s coach makes the point with liniment for the injured and a better road for everyone.
- Chautauqua movement
- Topic 6.11
A movement for adult education and self-improvement that began at Chautauqua Lake, New York, in 1874: summer lectures and concerts, plus reading courses by mail. Other towns copied it.
- CLSC (1878)
- Topic 6.11
The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle: a four-year home-reading course that gave a college-style education to people by mail. Most of its graduates were women.
- Audience (V.A.I.L.)
- Topic 6.11
AP skill 2.C: ask who a source was written for. V.A.I.L. is a checklist: Venue (where it appeared), Access (who could reach it), Influence (what power its audience had), Link (how it ties to Gilded Age reform).
- Single tax
- Topic 6.11
Henry George's proposal to replace all taxes with one tax on land. He argued that land gains value because of the community around it, so the community, not the owner, should collect that gain.
- Social Gospel
- Topic 6.11
A Protestant reform movement that said Christians must fix social problems such as low wages, child labor and slum housing, not only save individual souls.
- Socialism
- Topic 6.11
A political movement that wants the community, through government or worker control, to own the big industries instead of private owners. Debs called himself a socialist by 1897 and later ran for president as one.
- WCTU (1874)
- Topic 6.11
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: a women’s organization that fought alcohol and, under Frances Willard’s “Do Everything” policy, worked for prison reform, kindergartens, labor laws and the vote.
- General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1890)
- Topic 6.11
A national union of local women’s clubs, founded in New York in 1890. Its motto was “Unity in Diversity.” Members pressed for libraries, kindergartens, playgrounds and other civic improvements.
- NACW (1896)
- Topic 6.11
The National Association of Colored Women, formed in Washington in 1896 when two Black women’s federations merged. Mary Church Terrell was its first president, and its motto was “Lifting as we climb.”
- NAWSA (1890)
- Topic 6.11
The National American Woman Suffrage Association, formed in 1890 when the two rival wings of the suffrage movement, split since 1869, merged. Stanton was its first president; Susan B. Anthony took over in 1892.
- People's Party (Populists)
- Topic 6.11
A third party of farmers and labor reformers. Its 1892 convention in Omaha adopted a platform that called for government ownership of the railroads, telegraph and telephone, and a graduated income tax.
- Nineteenth Amendment
- Topic 6.11
Ratified in 1920. It bars the United States and every state from denying the vote "on account of sex." Many Black women in the South were still kept from the polls, by state laws and by threats.
- Free silver
- Topic 6.12
The demand that the Mint coin all the silver anyone brought in, at 16 ounces of silver to 1 of gold. Farmers and silver miners backed it, expecting more money in circulation, higher prices and easier debts.
- McKinley Tariff (1890)
- Topic 6.12
A Republican law that raised import taxes to about 50 percent on many goods. It protected U.S. factories from foreign competition, and it raised prices for buyers.
- Wabash v. Illinois (1886)
- Topic 6.12
The Supreme Court ruled that states cannot regulate railroad rates on shipments that cross state lines. Only Congress can. It left farmers with no rate regulator at all.
- Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)
- Topic 6.12
The first federal regulatory agency, created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 to oversee railroad rates. It could ask for fair rates but had little power to enforce them.
- Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)
- Topic 6.12
The first federal law against monopolies. It banned any 'combination in the form of trust or otherwise' that restrained trade. Courts enforced it weakly at first, and used it against labor unions.
- Alaska Purchase
- Topic 6.12
Seward's 1867 treaty bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, giving the U.S. a foothold in the North Pacific.
- Coaling station
- Topic 6.12
A port stocked with coal so steamships could refuel. The Navy needed a chain of them to cross the Pacific.
- Pan-American Conference (1889)
- Topic 6.12
Blaine's meeting of Western Hemisphere nations in Washington. Delegates refused a customs union but created a trade bureau, ancestor of the Organization of American States.
- Hard money vs. soft money
- Topic 6.12
Hard (sound) money is backed by gold and holds its value; bankers and creditors wanted it. Soft (easy) money is a bigger supply, such as greenbacks or silver; debtors and farmers wanted it.
- Specie Resumption Act
- Topic 6.12
1875 law promising that from January 1, 1879 the government would trade greenbacks for gold coin (“specie”), and cutting the number of greenbacks in circulation. A win for creditors and hard money.
- “Crime of ’73”
- Topic 6.12
The name silver supporters gave the Coinage Act of 1873, which dropped the silver dollar. They charged it was slipped through in secret and shrank the money supply, just as the silver price fell.
- Bland–Allison Act
- Topic 6.12
1878 compromise, passed over President Hayes’s veto: the Treasury had to buy $2–4 million of silver a month and coin it. More silver money than before, far short of free coinage.
- Sherman Silver Purchase Act
- Topic 6.12
Named for Senator John Sherman. The Treasury had to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver a month, paying in Treasury notes. It bought more silver than Bland–Allison but still fell short of free coinage.
- People's (Populist) Party
- Topic 6.12
The third party that farmers and labor reformers founded in 1892, built on the Farmers' Alliances. It wanted a much bigger government role in the economy: public ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax, and more money in circulation. Newspapers called its members Populists.
- Omaha Platform
- Topic 6.12
The People's Party's program, adopted at Omaha on July 4, 1892. It called for free silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, a secret ballot and direct election of senators, so that government would answer to ordinary people instead of big business.
- Graduated income tax
- Topic 6.12
A tax whose rate rises as income rises, so the rich pay a bigger share. Populists demanded one. Congress passed one in 1894, the Supreme Court struck it down in 1895, and the 16th Amendment (1913) made it constitutional.
- Direct election of senators
- Topic 6.12
Before 1913, state legislatures chose U.S. senators. Populists wanted voters to elect them directly. The 17th Amendment made that the rule in 1913.
- Coxey's Army
- Topic 6.12
A march of jobless men to Washington in 1894, led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey. They demanded federal public-works jobs paid for with new paper money. Its leaders were arrested, but the idea returned in the New Deal.
- Wilson–Gorman Tariff (1894)
- Topic 6.12
Lowered tariff rates modestly and created the first peacetime federal income tax: 2% on incomes over $4,000. It became law without Cleveland's signature, and the Supreme Court struck the tax down in 1895.
- United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895)
- Topic 6.12
The Court ruled that manufacturing is not interstate commerce, so the Sherman Antitrust Act could not break up a sugar trust that controlled nearly all U.S. refining. It weakened the government's main weapon against monopolies.
- Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895)
- Topic 6.12
The Court ruled the federal income tax a 'direct tax' that had to be split among the states by population, so it was unconstitutional. The 16th Amendment (1913) later overturned this.
- Coin's Financial School (1894)
- Topic 6.12
A best-selling pamphlet by William Harvey that argued for free silver in simple lectures and cartoons, told by a fictional boy financier. It turned silver from a money question into a popular crusade.
- Silver Republicans
- Topic 6.12
Western Republicans, mostly from silver-mining states, who wanted the free coinage of silver. Many walked out of the 1896 convention when their party chose gold, and some backed Bryan in the fall.
- Gold Bugs
- Topic 6.12
Supporters of the gold standard in 1896: mostly Republicans and Eastern business men, plus the Democrats loyal to President Cleveland. Some wore a small gold-bug pin.
- Claims and evidence
- Topic 6.12
Skill 3.D on the AP exam: explain how a piece of evidence supports, modifies (complicates), or refutes a source’s argument. Ask what backs the claim, what qualifies it, and what could disprove it.
- Fusion
- Topic 6.12
When a smaller party backs another party’s candidate instead of running its own. In 1896 the Populists fused with the Democrats behind Bryan.
- Front-porch campaign
- Topic 6.12
A campaign run from the candidate's home: delegations travel to him, he speaks to each from the porch, and party newspapers and pamphlets carry his words. McKinley used it in 1896 while Bryan toured the country by train.
- Mark Hanna
- Topic 6.12
Cleveland businessman who managed McKinley's 1896 campaign as head of the Republican National Committee. He raised millions from business and spent them on a national campaign of pamphlets and speakers.
- Election of 1896
- Topic 6.12
McKinley beat Bryan, 271 electoral votes to 176, in a campaign fought over gold and silver. It gave Republicans a lasting hold on the Northeast and Midwest, and the People's Party never recovered.
- Realignment
- Topic 6.12
A lasting shift in which large groups of voters change parties, creating a new majority coalition. After 1896, Republicans held business, the cities and much of the industrial North for a generation.
- Gold Standard Act (1900)
- Topic 6.12
Law of March 14, 1900 that made the gold dollar the standard of value and required the Treasury to keep every kind of U.S. money redeemable at that value. It closed the silver question for good.
- Gold standard
- Topic 6.13
A money system in which the government promises to swap every paper dollar for a fixed weight of gold. Supporters said it kept the dollar honest and steady. Critics said it kept money scarce, which held prices down and debts heavy.
- Cross of Gold speech
- Topic 6.13
William Jennings Bryan’s closing speech in the Democrats’ platform debate, July 9, 1896. It made him the party’s presidential nominee the next day, at 36, and turned the election into a fight over gold and silver.
- Patronage (spoils system)
- Topic 6.13
Giving government jobs to a winning party's loyal workers as a reward, whether or not they were qualified. Named for the saying that 'to the victor belong the spoils.' Reformers wanted federal jobs filled by merit instead.
- Waving the bloody shirt
- Topic 6.13
A Republican campaign tactic: reminding Northern voters, especially Union veterans, that Democrats had led the South into war and Republicans had saved the Union. Many Northern Democrats had fought for the Union too.
- Solid South
- Topic 6.13
The former Confederate states, which voted Democratic in nearly every election from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the mid-1900s. White Democrats held power there, and Black voters were increasingly shut out.
- Political machine
- Topic 6.13
A party organization that ran a city by trading jobs, services and favors to immigrants and the poor for their votes. A boss ran it from the top.
- Tammany Hall
- Topic 6.13
New York City's Democratic machine. It began as a social club and, under bosses like Tweed, controlled the city's jobs and contracts.
- Crédit Mobilier
- Topic 6.13
A sham construction company that Union Pacific insiders paid, at inflated prices, to build the railroad. They gave cheap shares to congressmen to keep Congress friendly. Exposed in 1872–73.
- Spoils system
- Topic 6.13
Giving government jobs to loyal party workers as a reward for votes and campaign work, not for skill. Also called patronage.
- Pendleton Civil Service Act
- Topic 6.13
The 1883 law that filled some federal jobs by competitive exam instead of party loyalty. It began the end of the spoils system.
- Mugwumps
- Topic 6.13
Reform-minded Republicans who refused to back Blaine in 1884 and voted for Cleveland. Party loyalists meant the name as an insult.
- Electoral College
- Topic 6.13
The states' electors, not the popular vote, choose the president. New York's 36 electors decided 1884: Cleveland 219, Blaine 182.
- Prohibition Party
- Topic 6.13
A third party that wanted to outlaw alcohol. Its 1884 candidate, John St. John, drew about 25,000 votes in New York.
- Gilded Age politics
- Topic 6.13
Fierce party loyalty, huge turnout, razor-thin elections, and few real differences between the parties.
- Industrialization
- Topic 6.14
The shift from farms and workshops to machines, factories and railroads. Between 1865 and 1898 steel, oil, electricity and giant corporations drove it, and it changed how Americans worked, where they lived and what they bought.
- World's Columbian Exposition
- Topic 6.14
The 1893 world's fair in Chicago, held for the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. It drew about 27 million admissions in six months and showed off American industry, electricity and city planning.
- Frontier thesis
- Topic 6.14
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 argument that the moving edge of settlement, the frontier, shaped American democracy and character, and that its closing ended an era. Critics point out the land was not empty: it was taken from Native nations.
- Frontier line
- Topic 6.14
The western edge of settled land on census maps: the line where population fell below two people per square mile. It moved west with every census from 1790 to 1880. In 1890 the Census Office said it could no longer be drawn.
- Corroborate
- Topic 6.14
Back a claim up with evidence. If a source or fact supports the argument, you say so, and you say why.
- Qualify
- Topic 6.14
Show where a claim stops being true. The argument holds in some places, for some people, or for some years, and not others.
- Modify
- Topic 6.14
Rewrite the claim to fit the evidence. If the facts contradict part of the argument, change the claim.
- Continuity and change
- Topic 6.14
An AP way of reasoning about a period: show what stayed the same, show what changed, then judge how much changed overall.
- Urbanization
- Topic 6.14
The growth of cities and the rising share of Americans who live in them. Between 1870 and 1890 the urban share rose from about 26% to about 35%, fed by farm families and immigrants.
- Complexity
- Topic 6.14
Making an argument that weighs change against continuity, or shows how one development affected different groups differently. A thesis with complexity says what changed, what didn't, and for whom.
- Pullman Strike (1894)
- Topic 6.14
A nationwide railroad boycott that began when Pullman's workers struck. Eugene Debs's American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars, and President Cleveland used a court order and federal troops to break the strike (KC-6.1.II.C).
- Staff
- Topic 6.14
The White City's 'marble': plaster of Paris and jute fiber, cast in molds and painted white over a timber or steel frame. It was cheap, fast to hang and only meant to last one season.