Web Quest

The Gilded Age

A Tale of Today.

2nd Industrial

Revolution

Words

Between 1870 and 1914, the Second Industrial Revolution peaked. After the cotton gin and steam power were invented in 1793, cotton and textiles were shipped in a triangle pattern. America needed massive industries, so they laid railroads to California, so that they could open up trade routes to the Pacific. They brought cotton up from South America in New England ship, that were then sent to Great Britain's large textile factories. Communities in America were also connected by new roads, steamboat, and most of all, railroads. The Transportation Revolution was what was linking these communities together. It let people ship their goods to a much larger variety of people. The Government also helped the the 2nd Industrial Revolution by encouraging the railroads to keep spreading. The Government also hired the army to get Indians off of the land that was wanted by the farmers and miners. The United States was producing one-third of the worlds industry output.

Big Businesses

Andrew Carnegie

John D. Rockefeller

The Gilded Age got its name from Mark Twain, who meant that it was that it was amazing looking on the outside, but awful on the inside. During the Gilded Age, big businesses ruled. There were 2 big names in the big businesses, John D. Rockefeller (who work in the oil industry), and Andrew Carnegie (who worked in the steel industry). John and Andrew were know as robber barons because through their harsh businesses deals, they got very rich. The need for iron and steel grew because the western resources (gold, silver, and lumber) needed to be shipped across the country. This caused the railroad industry in explode. The railroad industry exploded because the trains were needed to ship the resources from the west to the east, and vise-versa. There were a lot of industrial corruptions in the Gilded Age because businesses would get monopolies and become the only provided of a certain industry. Monopolies were bad because then the company could make the price of the product whatever they wanted.

Muckrakers

Woman's Rights

A Muckraker is someone who takes pictures, writes articles or books, or draws cartoons to try to show the government and people the bad parts of our country. They got the name muckrakers from Theodore Roosevelt, because they were always bringing up the dirty facts about our country that people didn't realize was there, or just ignored. They exposed many things like, political corruption, the trouble farmers were in because of the railroad monopolies, child labor, living conditions of the poor, the meat packing industries, and the awful things about the Standard Oil Industry.

The biggest change since the 19th century was that woman got their rights in America. The "New Woman" was when woman started leaving their homes and joining the public sphere . The woman started fighting for suffrage, better living conditions, child care, and issue related to reproductive rights. Some woman started working also. In paintings woman were seen differently because of the changes that woman trying to make.

Urban Life

Minorities

Most of the poor and the coming immigrants were Urban. They lived in mass housing called tenements. In 1878 a $500 award was going to be given to the person who could build the best tenement. James E. ware won this award. He designed a building that would cause light to enter no matter how crowded the tenements were. Since the tenement were over crowded disease like Cholera and Yellow-Fever, an Tuberculosis spread and killed may people. Everything in the city smelled incredibly bad. Sewage was a problem because if the sewers dumped the sewage into the rivers and waterways. Trash was a problem also, trash was thrown into the streets and waterways because the cities didn't have a system for disposing trash. The poor would steal from people because the pay they got from the factories wasn't enough to pay for food.

After the civil war racism in the south grew. Sharecropping, voting restrictions, and the violence from the Ku Klux Klan were some of the problems. Most African Americans looked for opportunity in the west. The African Americans who stayed though had to deal with the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws made it so that there was segregation of schools and many other public places. African Americans were not allowed to do many things because of racism.

Western Frontier

Thousands of Americans moved into the Great Plains. In the time before the Civil War people skipped over the Great Plains and tried to get to California and Oregon. From 1865 to the early 1900s, people changed their opinion about the Great Plains. Before the Civil War people thought it was a empty wasteland, but after the Civil War they thought that it was great because they had new inventions to help them survive their. Some of their inventions were, Sod Houses, Steel Plows, Water-pumping windmills, Barbed Wire, Railroads to the West, Wheat Farming, Dry Farming Techniques, and Beef Cattle Raising.

Politics

James Garfield

In the Gilded age there were a lot of accomplishment and inventions that were made. The President haw almost no power of influence, and there was corruption in Congress. Americans wouldn't listen to their leaders, and new societies were being built from the foundations. From the Civil War to 1890s America had a time of forgettable President. The forgettable President are the President who are always forgotten because they didn't do anything to get them recognized. Some of the forgettable President are, Ulysses S. Grant, because he didn't know how to be President. There was Rutherford B Hayes, because he won be i electoral vote and everyone thought that the election wasn't truthful. Also there was James Garfield, who was shot and killed 4 months into his term in office.

Web Quest

By: Jacob Gagner