Terms : Hide Images
| 3688244895 | "waving the bloody shirt" | the use of Civil War imagery by political candidates and parties to draw votes to their side of the ticket | 0 | |
| 3688244896 | Tweed Ring | a symbol of Gilded Age corruption, "Boss" Tweed and his deputies ran the New York City Democratic party in the 1860s and swindled $200 million from the city through bribery, graft, and vote-buying; Boss Tweed was eventually jailed for his crimes and died behind bars | 1 | |
| 3688244897 | Credit Mobilier scandal | (1872): a construction company was formed by owners of the Union Pacific Railroad for the purpose of receiving government contracts to build the railroad at highly inflated prices - and profits; in 1872 a scandal erupted when journalists discovered that the Credit Mobilier Company had bribed congressmen and even the Vice President in order to allow the ruse to continue | 2 | |
| 3688244898 | panic of 1873 | a world-wide depression that began in the United States when one of the nation's largest banks abruptly declared bankruptcy, leading to the collapse of thousands of banks and businesses; the crisis intensified debtors' calls for inflationary measures such as the printing of more paper money and the unlimited coinage of silver; conflicts over monetary policy greatly influenced politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century | 3 | |
| 3688244899 | Gilded Age | (1877-1896): a term given to the period 1865-1896 by Mark Twain, indicating both the fabulous wealth and the widespread corruption of the era | 4 | |
| 3688244900 | patronage | a system, prevalent during the Gilded Age, in which political parties granted jobs and favors to party regulars who delivered votes on election day; was both an essential wellspring of support for both parties and a source of conflict within the Republican party | 5 | |
| 3688244901 | Compromise of 1877 | the agreement that finally resolved the 1876 election and officially ended Reconstruction; in exchange for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, winning the presidency, Hayes agreed to withdraw the last of the federal troops from the former Confederate states; this deal effectively completed the southern return to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics | 6 | |
| 3688244902 | Civil Rights Act of 1875 | the last piece of federal civil rights legislation until the 1950s, the law promised blacks equal access to public accommodations and banned racism in jury selection, but the Act provided no means of enforcement and was therefore ineffective; in 1883, the Supreme Court declared most of the Act unconstitutional | 7 | |
| 3688244903 | sharecropping | an agricultural system that emerged after the Civil War in which black and white farmers rented land and residences from a plantation owner in exchange for giving him a certain "share" of each year's crop; was the dominant form of southern agriculture after the Civil War, and landowners manipulated this system to keep tenants in perpetual debt and unable to leave their plantations | 8 | |
| 3688244904 | Jim Crow | system of racial segregation in the American South from the end of Reconstruction until the mid-twentieth century; based on the concept of "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites, the Jim Crow system sought to prevent racial mixing in public, including restaurants, movie theaters, and public transportation; an informal system, it was generally perpetuated by custom, violence, and intimidation | 9 | |
| 3688244905 | Plessy v. Furguson | (1896): an 1896 Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, saying that as long as blacks were provided with "separate but equal" facilities, these laws did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment; this decision provided legal justification for the Jim Crow system until the 1950s | 10 | |
| 3688244906 | Chinese Exclusion Act | (1882): federal legislation that prohibited most further Chinese immigration to the United States; this was the first major legal restriction on immigration in U.S. history | 11 | |
| 3688244907 | Homestead Strike | (1892): a strike at a Carnegie steel plant in Homestead, P.A., that ended in an armed battle between the strikers, three hundred armed "Pinkerton" detectives hired by Carnegie, and federal troops, which killed ten people and wounded more than sixty; the strike was part of a nationwide wave of labor unrest in the summer of 1892 that helped the Populists gain some support from industrial workers | 12 | |
| 3688244908 | grandfather clause | a regulation established in many southern states in the 1890s that exempted from voting requirements (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) anyone who could prove that their ancestors ("grandfathers") had been able to vote in 1860; since slaves could not vote before the Civil War, these clauses guaranteed the right to vote to many whites while denying it to blacks | 13 | |
| 3688244909 | Jay Gould | millionaire who was partners with "Jubilee Jim" Fisk; the pair concocted a plot in 1869 to corner the gold market; their scheme would only work if the federal Treasury refrained from selling gold; they worked on President Grant directly and also through his brother-in-law; for weeks they bid the price of gold skyward, so they could later profit from its heightened value, but on "Black Friday" the bubble broke when the Treasury was compelled to release gold; the price of gold plunged and scores of honest business-people were driven to the wall | 14 | |
| 3688244910 | Horace Greeley | presidential candidate for the Liberal Republicans who was also endorsed by the Democrats; fearless editor of the New York Tribune who was dogmatic, emotional, petulant, and notoriously unsound in his political judgments | 15 | |
| 3688244911 | Rutherford B. Hayes | obscure Republican candidate who won his presidency through the Compromise of 1877 after irregular returns from four states; he was allowed to take office as long as he withdrew federal troops from the South, sacrificing the civil rights of southern blacks and effectively ending Reconstruction; class struggles mounted under his presidency in the long years of depression and deflation following the panic of 1873; his presidency was tarnished by scandals such as the Credit Mobilier scandal and the Whiskey Ring scandal | 16 | |
| 3688244912 | James A. Garfield | dark-horse candidate for Republican party who, after being elected president, was immediately ensnared in a political conflict between his secretary of state, Blaine, and Blaine's Stalwart nemesis, Senator Conkling; shot by a disappointed and mentally deranged office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau in the back of a Washington railroad station and died eleven weeks later on September 19, 1880 | 17 | |
| 3688244913 | Chester Arthur | a notorious Stalwart henchman and Garfield's vice president who assumed the presidency after Garfield died; he surprised his critics by prosecuting several fraud cases and giving his former Stalwart pals the cold shoulder; initiated civil reform with the Pendleton Act of 1883; however, his surprising display of integrity offended too many powerful Republicans and so he was not renominated | 18 | |
| 3688244914 | Grover Cleveland | noted Democratic reformer who won the presidential elections of 1884; a man of principles and a staunch believer in laissez-faire, he pleased business people and bankers; was put in an awkward position when it came to fighting pension-grabbers; proposed lower tariffs to Congress, angering Democrats and Republicans alike, and so was not reelected | 19 | |
| 3688244915 | Thomas B. Reed | Republican Speaker of the House who bent the intimidated House to his imperious will and dominated the "Billion-Dollar" Congress; under his leadership, Congress showered pensions on Civil War veterans and increases government purchases of silver; it also passed the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, boosting rates to their highest peacetime level ever | 20 | |
| 3688244916 | Tom Watson | populist leader who reached out to the black community, recognizing the crucial edge that black votes could give the party in the South; although he began his public career promoting interracial political cooperation, he eventually succumbed to racism | 21 | |
| 3688244917 | William Jennings Bryan | young Democratic congressman who held the galleries of Congress spellbound for three hours as he championed the cause of free silver | 22 | |
| 3688244918 | J. P. Morgan | early in 1895 Cleveland turned in desperation to this man, "the bankers' banker" and the head of a Wall Street syndicate; after tense negotiations at the White House, the bankers agreed to lend the government $65 million in gold | 23 | |
| 3688244919 | Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois | (1886): a Supreme Court decision that prohibited states from regulating the railroads because the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce; as a result, reformers turned their attention to the federal government, which now held sole power to regulate the railroad industry | 24 | |
| 3688244920 | Interstate Commerce Act | (1887): congressional legislation that established the Interstate Commerce Commission, compelled railroads to publish standard rates, and prohibited rebates and pools; railroads quickly became adept at using the Act to achieve their own ends, but the Act gave the government an important means to regulate big business | 25 | |
| 3688244921 | vertical integration | the practice perfected by Andrew Carnegie of controlling every step of the industrial production process in order to increase efficiency and limit competition | 26 | |
| 3688244922 | horizontal integration | the practice perfected by John D. Rockefeller of dominating a particular phase of the production process in order to monopolize a market, often by forming trusts and alliances with competitors | 27 | |
| 3688244923 | trust | a mechanism by which one company grants control over its operations, through ownership of its stock, to another company; the Standard Oil Company became known for this practice in the 1870s as it eliminated its competition by taking control of smaller oil companies | 28 | |
| 3688244924 | interlocking directorates | the practice of having executives or directors from one company serve on the Board of Directors of another company; J.P. Morgan introduced this practice to eliminate banking competition in the 1890s | 29 | |
| 3688244925 | Standard Oil Company | (1870-1911): John D. Rockefeller's company, formed in 1870, which came to symbolize the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age; by 1877, this company controlled 95% of the oil refineries in the U.S.; it was also one of the first multinational corporations, and at times distributed more than half of the company's kerosene production outside the U.S.; by the turn of the century it had become a target for trust-busting reformers, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it to break up into several dozen smaller companies | 30 | |
| 3688244926 | Social Darwinists | believers in the idea, popular in the late nineteenth century, that people gained wealth by "survival of the fittest"; therefore, the wealthy had simply won a natural competition and owed nothing to the poor, and indeed service to the poor would interfere with this organic process; some applied this theory to whole nations and races, explaining that powerful peoples were naturally endowed with gifts that allowed them to gain superiority over others; this theory provided one of the popular justifications for U.S. imperial ventures like the Spanish-American war | 31 | |
| 3688244927 | Sherman Anti-Trust Act | (1890): a law that forbade trusts or combinations in business, this was landmark legislation because it was one of the first Congressional attempts to regulate big business for the public good; at first the law was mostly used to restrain trade unions as the courts tended to side with companies in legal cases; in 1914 the Act was revised so it could more effectively be used against monopolistic corporations | 32 | |
| 3688244928 | National Labor Union | (1866-1872): this first national labor organization in U.S. history was founded in 1866 and gained 600,000 members from many parts of the workforce, although it limited the participation of Chinese, women, and blacks; the organization devoted much of its energy to fighting for an eight-hour work day before it dissolved in 1872 | 33 | |
| 3688244929 | Knights of Labor | the second national labor organization, organized in 1869 as a secret society and opened for public membership in 1881; the Knights were known for their efforts to organize all workers, regardless of skill level, gender, or race; after the mid-1880s their membership declined for a variety of reasons, including the Knights' participation in violent strikes and discord between skilled and unskilled members | 34 | |
| 3688244930 | Haymarket Square | (1886): a May Day rally that turned violent when someone threw a bomb into the middle of the meeting, killing several dozen people; eight anarchists were arrested for conspiracy contributing to the disorder, although evidence linking them to the bombing was thin; four were executed, one committed suicide, and three were pardoned in 1893 | 35 | |
| 3688244931 | American Federation of Labor | a national federation of trade unions that included only skilled workers, founded in 1886; led by Samuel Gompers for nearly four decades, the AFL sought to negotiate with employers for a better kind of capitalism that rewarded workers fairly with better wages, hours, and conditions; the AFL's membership was almost entirely white and male until the middle of the twentieth century | 36 | |
| 3688244932 | closed shop | a union-organizing term that refers to the practice of allowing only unionized employees to work for a particular company; the AFL became known for negotiating ___________ agreements with employers, in which the employer would agree not to hire non-union members | 37 | |
| 3688244933 | Cornelius Vanderbilt | the genius in the enterprise of welding together and expanding the older eastern networks of railroad; having made his millions in steamboating, he turned to a new career in railroading; offering superior railway service at lower rates, he amassed a fortune of $100 million | 38 | |
| 3688244934 | Alexander Graham Bell | introduced the invention of the telephone in 1876, on top of which a gigantic communications network was built | 39 | |
| 3688244935 | Thomas Alva Edison | a versatile inventor who was a gifted tinkerer and a tireless worker; devices such as the phonograph, the mimeograph, the dictaphone, and the moving picture poured out of his "invention factory" in New Jersey; probably best known for his perfection in 1879 of the electric lightbulb | 40 | |
| 3688244936 | Andrew Carnegie | the steel king who integrated every phase of his steel-making operation, pioneering the creative entrepreneurial tactic of vertical integration; by 1900 he was producing one-fourth of the nation's Bessemer steel; eventually sold his holdings to J.P. Morgan for over $400 million and then gave away most of it for philanthropic purposes | 41 | |
| 3688244937 | John D. Rockefeller | the oil baron who perfected a device for controlling rivals - the trust - and mastered horizontal integration to ally with competitors to monopolize the oil market with Standard Oil Company; he employed the tactics of aggressive consolidation and pursued a policy of rule or ruin, disregarding business ethics but eventually coming to control 95% of all the oil refineries in the country | 42 | |
| 3688244938 | Samuel Gompers | elected president of the American Federation of Labor every year except one from 1886 to 1924; a bitter foe of socialism, he shunned politics for economic strategies and goals; he had no quarrel with capitalism, but he demanded a fairer share for labor; promoted "pure and simple" unionism and sought better wages, hours, and working conditions; additionally, a major goal of his was the trade agreement authorizing closed shop | 43 | |
| 3688244939 | New Immigrants | immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who formed a recognizable wave of immigration from the 1880s until 1924, in contrast to the immigrants from western Europe who had come before them; these new immigrants congregated in ethnic urban neighborhoods, where they worried many native-born Americans, some of whom responded with nativist anti-immigrant campaigns and others of whom introduced urban reforms to help the immigrants assimilate | 44 | |
| 3688244940 | settlement houses | mostly run by middle-class native-born women, they provided housing, food, education, child care, cultural activities, and social connections for new arrivals to the United States in immigrant neighborhoods; many women, both native-born and immigrant, developed lifelong passions for social activism in these places; Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago and Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City were two of the most prominent | 45 | |
| 3688244941 | liberal Protestants | members of a branch of Protestantism that flourished from 1875 to 1925 and encouraged followers to use the Bible as a moral compass rather than to believe that the Bible represented scientific or historical truth; many became active in the "social gospel" and other reform movements of the era | 46 | |
| 3688244942 | Tuskegee Institute | a normal and industrial school led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama; it focused on training young black students in agriculture and the trades to help them achieve economic independence; Washington justified segregated, vocational training as a necessary first step on the road to racial equality, although critics accused him of being too "accomodationist" | 47 | |
| 3688244943 | land-grant colleges | colleges and universities created from allocations of public land through the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act of 1887; these grants helped fuel the boom in higher education in the late nineteenth century, and many of today's public universities derive from these grants | 48 | |
| 3688244944 | pragmatism | a distinctive American philosophy that emerged in the late nineteenth century around the theory that the true value of an idea lay in its ability to solve problems; followers thus embraced the provisional, uncertain nature of experimental knowledge; among the most well-known purveyors of this philosophy were John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and William James | 49 | |
| 3688244945 | yellow journalism | a scandal-mongering practice of journalism that emerged in New York during the Gilded Age out of the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal; the expression has remained a pejorative term referring to sensationalist journalism practiced with unethical, unprofessional standards | 50 | |
| 3688244946 | National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) | an organisation founded in 1890 to demand the vote for women; it argued that women should be allowed to vote because their responsibilities in the home and family made them indispensable in the public decision-making process; during WWI, it supported the war effort and lauded women's role in the Allied victory, which helped to finally achieve nationwide woman suffrage in the Nineteenth Amendment | 51 | |
| 3688244947 | Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) | founded in Ohio in the 1870s to combat the evils of excessive alcohol consumption, it went on to embrace a broad reform agenda, including campaigns to abolish prostitution and gain the right to vote for women | 52 | |
| 3688244948 | realism | mid-nineteenth-century movement in European and American literature and the arts that sought to depict contemporary life and society as it actually was, in all its unvarnished detail; adherents eschewed the idealism and nostalgia of the earlier romantic sensibility | 53 | |
| 3688244949 | naturalism | an offshoot of mainstream realism, this late-nineteenth-century literary movement purported to apply detached scientific objectivity to the study of human characters shaped by degenerate heredity and extreme or sordid social environments | 54 | |
| 3688244950 | regionalism | a recurring artistic movement that, in the context of the late nineteenth century, aspired to capture the peculiarities, or "local color," of America's various regions in the face of modernization and national standardization | 55 | |
| 3688244951 | City Beautiful movement | a turn-of-the-century movement among progressive architects and city planners, who aimed to promote order, harmony, and virtue while beautifying the nation's new urban spaces with grand boulevards, welcoming parks, and monumental public buildings | 56 | |
| 3688244952 | World's Columbian Exposition | (1893): held in Chicago, Americans saw this World's Fair as their opportunity to claim a place among the world's most "civilized" societies, by which they meant the countries of western Europe; the Fair honored art, architecture, and science, and its promoters built a mini-city in which to host the fair that reflected all the ideals of city planning popular at the time; for many, this was the high point of the "City Beautiful" movement | 57 | |
| 3688244953 | Jane Addams | a middle-class woman who was deeply dedicated to uplifting the urban masses; one of the the first generation of college-educated women, she acquired the decaying Hull mansion in Chicago in 1889 and established Hull House, the most prominent American settlement house; a broad-gauge reformer who courageously condemned war as well as poverty, she eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 | 58 | |
| 3688244954 | Charles Darwin | English naturalist who set forth the sensational theory that higher forms of life had slowly evolved from lower forms, through a process of random biological mutation and adaptation; by providing a material explanation (natural selection) for the evolutionary process , his theory explicitly rejected the "dogma of special creations," which ascribed the design of each fixed species to divine agency | 59 | |
| 3688244955 | Booker T. Washington | the foremost champion of black education and an ex-slave called in 1881 to head the black normal and industrial school at Tuskegee, Alabama; he taught black students useful trades so that they could gain self-respect and economic security; he grudgingly acquiesced in segregation in return for the right to develop the economic and educational resources of the black community | 60 | |
| 3688244956 | W. E. B. Du Bois | assailed Booker T. Washington as an "Uncle Tom" who was condemning their race to manual labor and perpetual inferiority; he was the first black person to earn a phD at Harvard; demanded complete equality for blacks, social as well as economic, and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); an exceptionally skilled historian, sociologist, and poet, he died as a self-exile in Africa in 1963 | 61 | |
| 3688244957 | Joseph Pulitzer | a leader in the techniques of sensationalism through his ownership of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World; his use of colored comic supplements featuring the "Yellow Kid" gave the name yellow journalism to his lurid sheets | 62 | |
| 3688244958 | William Randolph Hearst | able to draw on his California father's mining millions, he ultimately built a powerful chain of newspapers, beginning with the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 | 63 | |
| 3688244959 | John Dewey | pragmatist who became a public intellectual and social activist; he founded the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896, continually stressed the positive virtues of experience, cooperation, and democracy, and urged philosophers to abandon futile debates about knowledge in favor of tackling the real "problems of men" | 64 | |
| 3688244960 | Carrie Chapman Catt | the most effective leader of the new generation of women who had taken command of the suffrage battle; under her the suffragists deemphasized the argument that women deserved the vote as a matter of right, instead stressing the desirability of giving women the vote if they were to continue to discharge their traditional duties as homemakers and mothers | 65 | |
| 3688244961 | Horatio Alger | a Puritan-reared New Englander, who wrote more than a hundred volumes of juvenile fiction that sold over 17 million copies; he implanted in his readers moral lessons and the conviction that there is always room at the top | 66 | |
| 3688244962 | Mark Twain | typified a new breed of American authors in revolt against the elegant refinements of the old New England school of writing; his works include Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; journalist, humorist, satirist, and foe of social injustice, he made his most enduring contribution in capturing frontier realism and colloquial humor in the authentic American dialect | 67 | |
| 3688244963 | Henry James | taking as his dominant theme the confrontation of innocent Americans with subtle Europeans, he penned a remarkable number of brilliant realist novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove; his fiction experimented with point of view and interior monologue, and he frequently made women his central characters | 68 | |
| 3688244964 | Winslow Homer | artist who brought a mastery to the pastoral farms and swelling seas of the Northeast; earthily American and largely resistant to foreign influences, he reveled in rugged realism and boldness of conception | 69 | |
| 3688244965 | Augustus Saint-Gaudens | the most gifted sculptor yet produced by America; the national urge to commemorate the Civil War brought him a number of famous commissions, including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial | 70 | |
| 3688244966 | Frederick Law Olmstead | park builder who sought to foster virtue and egalitarian values with his designs for New York's Central Park and Boston's "Emerald Necklace", as well as the campus of Stanford University | 71 |
