Period 6 Glided Age: Development of the Middle Class by JACOB R PALCHAK

Key Terms

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Monopoly: During the Gilded Age, many businessmen became wealthy by gaining control of entire industries. Which led to them controlling an entire sector of the economy is known as having a monopoly.

Consolidation: Consolidation was a process of reducing competition and controlling markets by forming large-scale businesses in the Gilded Age (1870-1900), a period of rapid industrialization and economic growth in the United States.

Laissez- Historians often call the period between 1870 and the early 1900s the Gilded Age. This was an era of rapid industrialization, laissez-faire capitalism, and no income tax. Captains of industry like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie made fortunes. They also preached "survival of the fittest" in business.

Social Darwinism- Many Social Darwinists embraced laissez-faire capitalism and racism. They believed that government should not interfere in the "survival of the fittest" by helping the poor, and promoted the idea that some races are biologically superior to others. The ideas of Social Darwinism pervaded many aspects of American society in the Gilded Age

Pools- During the American Gilded Age in the 19th century, railroad companies and other businesses formed pools as a means of maintaining control over industry prices and profits. These pools were essentially agreements between different companies to work together and eliminate competition by fixing prices and dividing up markets.

People

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Rockefeller: John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He was by most definitions the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history.

JP Morgan: John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier and industrial organizer during the Gilded Age. In 1885, America was years into a depression, and gold reserves were down more than 50%. Morgan feared that if the U.S. dollar was devalued, his fortune would be in jeopardy.

Vanderbilt: The Gilded Age 's Vanderbilt family was considered a new-money family because, unlike the old-money families, the Vanderbilts were not prominent before the American Revolution. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the patriarch who amassed a large fortune in the shipping and railroad industries in the mid-1800s.

Carnegie: Andrew Carnegie, a pioneer in the steel industry, laid out why he would be donating the bulk of his wealth – an estimated $350 million (worth about $4.8 billion today).

Adam Smith: Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment.

Primary Source

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Devlopment on the west-The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles, machines, steel, oil, rubber, and tools, among other finished products.

Immagration and Migration-hey also ate foods grown in American soil and relied upon America’s iron ore, coal, and lumber, all transported from the hinterlands to the great shipping ports by American-built railroads. This frenzy of production transformed the United States in the decades following the Civil War, making it the most dynamic economic engine in the world.

Visuals

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Timeline Events

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1865-1877 Reconstruction Era

1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad

1870 15th Amendment

1873 Panic of 1873

1877 Great Railroad Strike

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

1886 Haymarket Riot

Visuals

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Visuals

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Expanding of the Middle Class

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Most residents of American cities during the Gilded Age worked demanding jobs for low wages, toiling in factories or sweatshops and returning at night to crowded and unsanitary housing. But the new era of industry and innovation didn’t only produce misery: as factories and commercial enterprises expanded, they required an army of bookkeepers, managers, and secretaries to keep business running smoothly. These new clerical jobs, which were open to women as well as men, fostered the growth of a middle class of educated office workers who spent their surplus income on a growing variety of consumer goods and leisure activities.

The Gospel of wealth

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During the Gilded Age, the wealthy displayed their earnings in various ways, including buying entire villages, rerouting trains, building gold bathrooms, shipping in bugs from Brazil, and creating elaborate themed parties. The Gilded Age was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class.

Working Women

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In July 1848, the first calls for women’s suffrage were made from a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. This convention kicked off more than seventy years of organizing, parading, fundraising, advertising, and petitioning before the 19th amendment securing this right was approved by Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures

Impact of Income on Urban Development

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Although not all of them intended to stay, most immigrants came to the United States for economic opportunity. Cheap land and relatively high wages, compared to their home countries, were available regardless of citizenship. The Homestead Act did not require that settlers filing for land be American citizens, and the railroads not only sold their land grants cheaply, they advertised widely in Europe.

The results of this distribution of fertile and largely accessible land were astonishing. Everything in the late nineteenth century seemed to move faster than ever before. Americans brought more land under cultivation between 1870 and 1900

Changes in Education

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Higher education, once reserved for the children of the elite, was now open to a new class of young people. Women, as well as men, took advantage of these new educational opportunities. At the end of the century, about 40 percent of college graduates were women. 2 Educated men and women entered the working world as managers and clerical workers.

Growth in Popular Culture

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The railroads were typical of the economic contradictions of the era. Over the period as a whole, American industry advanced rapidly. By 1900 the United States had one half the world’s manufacturing capacity. At the end of the century, it had overtaken Great Britain both in iron and steel production and in coal production.