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Welcome to FloridaStudents.org, your source for Student Tutorials and Resources. This website is freely available to Florida public schools and login is integrated with all districts. Inside this website you will find resources to support your learning in language arts, mathematics, science, civics, and U.S. History.

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Free gamified quizzes on every subject that students play in class and at home. Pick an existing quiz or create your own for review, formative assessment, and more.

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Start studying Ch 6 Cities, Immigrants, and Farmers. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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So, this document, while it was written by someone who should not have a Wikipedia page, points out that most immigrants to America were coming for the most obvious reason: opportunity. Industrialization, both in manufacturing and agriculture, meant that there were jobs in America. There was so much work, in fact, that companies used labor recruiters who went to Europe to advertise opportunities. Plus, the passage was relatively cheap, provided you were only going to make it once in your life, and it was fast, taking only eight to twelve days on the new steam-powered ships.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan became the magnet for waves of immigrants. First Germans, then Eastern European Jews, and Italians, who tended to recreate towns and neighborhoods within blocks and sometimes single buildings. Tenements, these four-, five-, and six-story buildings that were designed to be apartments, sprang up in the second half of the 19th century, and the earliest ones were so unsanitary and crowded that the city passed laws requiring a minimum of light and ventilation. And often these tenement apartments doubled as work spaces, because many immigrant women and children took in piece work, especially in the garment industry.

Despite local laws mandating the occasional window and outlawing the presence of cows on public streets, conditions in these cities were pretty bad. Things got a little bit better with the construction of elevated railroads and, later, subways, that helped relieve traffic congestion, but they created a new problem: pickpockets. "Pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation ... the foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache." So, that's changed!

This new transportation technology also allowed a greater degree of residential segregation in cities. Manhattan's downtown area had, at one time, housed the very rich as well as the very poor, but improved transportation meant that people no longer had to live and work in the same place. The wealthiest, like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, constructed lavish palaces for themselves, and uptown townhouses were common.

But until then, one of the most notable features of gilded-age cities like New York was that the rich and the poor lived in such close proximity to each other. And this meant that with America's growing urbanization, the growing distance between rich and poor was visible to both rich and poor. And much as we see in today's megacity, this inability to look away from poverty and economic inequality became a source of concern. Now, one way to alleviate such concern is to create suburbs, so you don't have to look at poor people. But, another response to urban problems was politics, which, in cities like New York, became something of a contact sport.

Another response was the so-called Progressive Movement. And in all of these responses and in the issues that prompted them--urbanization, mechanization, capitalism, the distribution of resources throughout the social order--we can see modern industrial America taking shape, and that is the America we live in today.

Thank you for watching. I'll see you next week.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25

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So, this document, while it was written by someone who should not have a Wikipedia page, points out that most immigrants to America were coming for the most obvious reason: opportunity. Industrialization, both in manufacturing and agriculture, meant that there were jobs in America.

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Crash Course Questionnaire: Immigrants and Cities

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Crash Course Questionnaire: Immigrants and Cities

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Plunkitt became famous for writing a book describing the way that New York City's government actually worked, but he was a small fish compared with the most famous shark-like machine politician of the day: William "Boss" Tweed, seen here with a head made of money.

"Boss" Tweed basically ran New York in the 1860s and early 1870s and his grandest feat of swindling helps explain how the machine system worked. It revolved around the, then new, county courthouse that now houses the New York City Department of Education. Building the courthouse was initially estimated to cost around $250,000, but ended up costing $13,000,000 by the time it was finished in 1871. Included in that cost was a bill of $180,000 for 3 tables and 40 chairs, $1.5 million for lighting fixtures, and $41,000 for brooms and cleaning supplies. A plasterer received $500,000 for his initial job and then $1,000,000 to repair his shoddy work. The standard kickback in these situations was that Tammany Hall received $2 for every $1 received by the contractor. That may seem like a bad deal for contractors, but remember, that plasterer still got to keep half a million dollars, which is worth about nine million dollars in today's money.

Now, of course, that makes it sounds like political machines were pure evil, especially if you were a taxpayer footing the bill for that courthouse. But machines also provided valuable services to immigrants and other poor people in cities. As Plunkitt explained, Tammany could help families in need: "I don't ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don't refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two, and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things running again." In return for this help, Tammany expected votes, so that they could stay in power. Staying in power meant control of city jobs as well as city contracts. Plunkitt claimed to know "every big employer in the district- and in the whole city, for that matter- and they ain't in the habit of saying no to me when I ask them for a job."

But with all the corruption, sometimes even that wasn't enough. Fortunately, Tammany politicians could always fall back on fraud. Tammany found bearded men to vote, then took them to the barber to shave off the beard but left the mustache so that they could vote a second time, and then they would shave off the stache so they could vote for a third. And then, of course, there was always violence and intimidation. By the end of the century, a Tammany regular lamented the good ol' days when quote, "It was wonderful to see my men slug the opposition to preserve the sanctity of the ballot."

But corruption wasn't limited to big cities like New York and Chicago; some of the biggest boondoggles involved the United States Congress and the executive branch under President Ulysses Grant. The first scandal, dubbed "The King of Frauds" by T he New York Sun, involved Credit Mobilier, the construction company that did most of the road building for the Union Pacific Railroad. This two-pronged accusation involved first, overcharging the public for construction costs and siphoning off profits to Credit Mobilier and second, bribery of Congressmen. Now the second charge was, of course, much juicer and also more partisan because only Republican Congressmen, including the Speaker of the House, were implicated in it. Eventually, Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames was found guilty of giving bribes, but no one was ever found guilty of receiving those bribes. As you can imagine, that did wonders for the reputation of Congress.

The second major scandal involved the so called "Whiskey Ring," which was a group of distillers in Saint Louis who decided they didn't like paying excise taxes on their product, perhaps a slightly more noble cause than that of the 2009 Bling Ring, who just wanted to dress like Paris Hilton.

John McDonald, a Grant administration official, helped distillers reduce their taxes by intentionally under-counting the number of kegs of booze. But then in 1875 the tax evasion grew out of control and McDonald eventually confessed and was convicted, thereby tainting the presidency with corruption just as Credit Mobilier had tainted Congress. That leaves the Supreme Court untainted, but don't worry, the Dred Scott Decision is worth at least, like, eighty years of tainting.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - Gilded Age Politics:Crash Course US History #26

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Plunkitt became famous for writing a book describing the way that New York City's government actually worked, but he was a small fish compared with the most famous shark-like machine politician of the day: William "Boss" Tweed, seen here with a head made of money.

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Crash Course Questionnaire: Gilded Age Politics

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Crash Course Questionnaire: Gilded Age Politics

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The Vanderbilt Ball - The Party of the Century.

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The Vanderbilt Ball - The Party of the Century.

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Objective 2.7- Mass Culture in the Gilded Age