Unit 6: Period 6: 1865 to 1898

22 terms. Say what each one means, then open the card to check.

• Transcontinental railroad

  The first rail line across the continent, finished in 1869 when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah, built with federal land grants and loans.

  Example. Thousands of Chinese immigrants laid track for the Central Pacific through the Sierra Nevada.

• Vertical integration

  Owning every stage of making a product, from raw materials to finished goods and shipping.

  Example. Carnegie Steel bought iron ore mines, coal fields and ore ships so it never had to pay another firm for supplies.

• Horizontal integration

  Buying up or combining with rival firms in the same business to control a market.

  Example. By the late 1870s Standard Oil had bought out most competing oil refineries and controlled about nine tenths of American refining.

• Trust

  A business arrangement in which stockholders of several companies hand control to one board of trustees, letting rival firms act as one.

  Example. The Standard Oil Trust, set up in 1882, joined dozens of oil companies under one board.

• Social Darwinism

  The misuse of ideas about natural selection to argue that wealth and poverty reflect fitness, so government should not help the poor or regulate business.

  Example. The sociologist William Graham Sumner argued that aid to the poor only rewarded the unfit at the expense of the thrifty.

• Gospel of Wealth

  Andrew Carnegie's 1889 argument that the rich should use their fortunes during their lives for the public good, such as libraries and schools.

  Example. Carnegie paid for more than 2,500 public library buildings in the United States and other countries.

• Knights of Labor

  A national labor organization, strongest in the mid-1880s, that welcomed skilled and unskilled workers, women and Black workers and called for an eight-hour day.

  Example. Its membership rose to around 700,000 in 1886 and then fell quickly after the Haymarket bombing.

• American Federation of Labor

  A union federation founded in 1886 under Samuel Gompers that organized skilled workers by craft and focused on wages, hours and conditions.

  Example. Its member unions bargained for carpenters, cigar makers and printers rather than for all workers in one big union.

• New immigrants

  The wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, such as Italy, Poland and Russia, who arrived in large numbers from the 1880s on.

  Example. Many Jewish families who fled Russia in the 1880s and 1890s settled in New York's Lower East Side.

• Nativism

  Hostility toward immigrants and the wish to favor native-born Americans, often tied to religion or race.

  Example. The American Protective Association, founded in 1887, campaigned against Catholic immigrants.

• Political machine

  A city party organization, run by a boss, that traded jobs, favors and help for votes and often grew rich on graft.

  Example. New York's Tammany Hall gave immigrants coal and jobs and in return expected their votes on election day.

• Settlement house

  A center in a poor city neighborhood where middle-class reformers lived and offered classes, child care and services to immigrants.

  Example. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889.

• Chinese Exclusion Act

  The 1882 law that suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers, the first major federal law to restrict immigration by nationality.

  Example. Chinese men already in the United States who left to visit family in China often could not return.

• Homestead Act

  The 1862 law that offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who lived on and farmed it for five years.

  Example. Families on the Great Plains often built sod houses because the treeless land had little timber.

• Dawes Act

  The 1887 law that broke up reservation land into individual allotments, meant to turn Native people into private farmers, with leftover land sold to settlers.

  Example. Native-held land shrank from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million by 1934.

• Assimilation policy

  Federal efforts to make Native Americans give up their languages, religions and ways of life and adopt white American culture.

  Example. Boarding schools such as Carlisle in Pennsylvania cut students' hair, changed their names and punished them for speaking their own languages.

• Wounded Knee

  The 1890 killing of about 250 or more Lakota men, women and children by the U.S. Army in South Dakota, often seen as the end of the Plains wars.

  Example. The army had moved in to stop the Ghost Dance, a religious movement that promised the return of the old ways of life.

• Gilded Age

  A name for roughly 1870 to 1900, from a Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner novel, suggesting a thin coat of gold over deep problems.

  Example. Mansions on New York's Fifth Avenue stood a short walk from crowded tenements.

• Pendleton Act

  The 1883 law that required some federal jobs to be filled by merit exams rather than as party rewards.

  Example. Congress passed it after a disappointed office seeker shot President Garfield in 1881.

• Interstate Commerce Act

  The 1887 law requiring railroad rates on interstate routes to be reasonable and just, and creating the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency.

  Example. Farmers who paid more to ship a short distance than shippers paid on long routes pushed for this law.

• People's (Populist) Party

  A farmer-based party formed in 1892 that called for free silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of railroads and direct election of senators.

  Example. Its 1892 presidential candidate, James Weaver, carried four states and won over a million votes.

• Plessy v. Ferguson

  The 1896 Supreme Court ruling that state laws requiring racially separate facilities were constitutional if the facilities were equal.

  Example. Southern states used the ruling to defend separate schools, railroad cars and waiting rooms for decades.