The Gilded Age (1865–1898): every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
108 flashcard terms for AP U.S. History Unit 6, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 29-question quiz — free, no account needed.
Mark Twain's label for the late 1800s: glittering industrial wealth over deep corruption, inequality, and social strain.
Transcontinental Railroad (1869)
Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Point, Utah — binding the continent, built largely by Irish and Chinese labor with federal land grants.
Railroad Land Grants
The federal government gave railroads over 170 million acres — subsidizing construction while fueling corruption and speculation.
Second Industrial Revolution
Steel, oil, electricity, and telegraphs/telephones transformed the economy after the Civil War — America became the world's leading industrial power by 1900.
Bessemer Process
Cheap mass-produced steel — the skeleton of railroads, bridges (Brooklyn Bridge), and the first skyscrapers.
Andrew Carnegie
Scottish immigrant who built Carnegie Steel through vertical integration, then preached the 'Gospel of Wealth' and gave away his fortune.
Vertical Integration
Controlling every stage of production — Carnegie owned mines, ships, railroads, and mills — to cut costs and crush competitors.
John D. Rockefeller
Standard Oil's founder, who used horizontal integration and the trust to control ~90% of U.S. oil refining.
Horizontal Integration & Trusts
Merging or allying with competitors in the same industry; the trust device let one board control 'competing' firms.
J.P. Morgan
The era's dominant banker — reorganized railroads, created U.S. Steel (1901, the first billion-dollar corporation), and twice bailed out the U.S. Treasury.
'Robber Barons' vs. 'Captains of Industry'
The era's debate: were the industrialists predatory monopolists or productive organizers who raised living standards? Strong essays argue both.
Social Darwinism
Applying 'survival of the fittest' to society — wealth as fitness, poverty as failure, regulation as interference with natural law.
Gospel of Wealth (1889)
Carnegie's doctrine that the rich are trustees who must give their fortunes to benefit society — libraries, universities, philanthropy.
Horatio Alger Myth
Rags-to-riches novels preaching that pluck and luck brought success — a myth that sustained faith in mobility amid inequality.
Laissez-Faire
The reigning ideology that government should not interfere with business — though business happily took tariffs, land grants, and injunctions.
Interstate Commerce Act (1887)
Created the ICC to regulate railroad rates after Granger pressure — the first federal regulatory agency, weak at first.
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)
Outlawed combinations 'in restraint of trade' — vaguely written, rarely enforced, and initially used more against unions than trusts.
Knights of Labor
An inclusive union (skilled and unskilled, women, Black workers) seeking broad reform; it collapsed after Haymarket tarred it with radicalism.
Haymarket Affair (1886)
A bomb at a Chicago labor rally killed police; anarchists were convicted on flimsy evidence, and the backlash crippled the Knights.
American Federation of Labor (1886)
Samuel Gompers's federation of skilled craft unions pursuing 'bread and butter' goals: wages, hours, conditions.
Samuel Gompers
AFL founder who rejected utopian politics for practical unionism — higher wages, shorter hours, collective bargaining.
Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The first national strike; federal troops crushed it with ~100 dead — announcing the era's violent labor conflict.
Homestead Strike (1892)
Carnegie's plant defeated the steelworkers' union in a bloody battle with Pinkertons — a devastating union defeat.
Pullman Strike (1894)
A national boycott led by Debs's American Railway Union was broken by federal injunction and troops — courts as management's ally.
Eugene V. Debs
Railway union leader jailed at Pullman; he emerged a socialist and five-time presidential candidate.
New Immigration
After 1880, immigrants increasingly came from southern and eastern Europe — Italians, Jews, Slavs — Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish, crowding industrial cities.
Ellis Island (1892)
The New York harbor station that processed millions of European immigrants.
Angel Island
San Francisco's immigration station, where Asian immigrants faced harsh interrogations and long detentions.
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
Banned Chinese laborers — the first federal law excluding an ethnic group, born of western racism and labor fears.
Nativism & the APA
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements revived, demanding literacy tests and restriction as cities filled with newcomers.
Urbanization
Cities exploded — by 1900, 40% of Americans were urban; skyscrapers, streetcars, and slums remade the landscape.
Tenements & 'How the Other Half Lives'
Jacob Riis's photo-journalism (1890) exposed the disease-ridden, overcrowded tenements of New York's poor.
Political Machines & Boss Tweed
Urban machines like Tammany Hall traded services and jobs for immigrant votes; Tweed's ring stole tens of millions before Thomas Nast's cartoons helped bring him down.
Settlement Houses & Jane Addams
Hull House (Chicago, 1889) brought educated women into immigrant neighborhoods with classes, childcare, and reform advocacy — seedbed of social work and Progressivism.
Social Gospel
Protestant movement applying Christian ethics to industrial problems — salvation through social reform as well as personal piety.
Homestead Act in Practice
Free western land drew millions, though railroads and speculators got the best tracts; sodbusters battled drought, locusts, and debt.
Exodusters
Black Southerners who fled post-Reconstruction violence to Kansas homesteads in 1879 — an early Great Migration.
Plains Indian Wars
Decades of war as railroads, miners, and settlers invaded Native lands — Sand Creek (1864), Little Bighorn (1876), and the long resistance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, and Nez Percé.
Little Bighorn (1876)
Sioux and Cheyenne under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse annihilated Custer's command — a victory that brought overwhelming retaliation.
Destruction of the Buffalo
Commercial and army-encouraged slaughter reduced tens of millions of bison to near extinction — destroying the Plains peoples' economic base.
Reservation System
Native nations confined to shrinking tracts, dependent on corrupt agencies — sovereignty and subsistence both stripped away.
Dawes Act (1887)
Broke up tribal lands into individual allotments to force assimilation; 'surplus' land sold to whites — Natives lost two-thirds of their land by 1934.
Carlisle & Boarding Schools
'Kill the Indian, save the man': Native children removed to schools that suppressed language, religion, and identity.
Ghost Dance & Wounded Knee (1890)
A spiritual revival movement frightened officials; the Seventh Cavalry massacred ~250 Lakota at Wounded Knee — the Indian Wars' brutal end.
Frontier Thesis (1893)
Frederick Jackson Turner argued the frontier shaped American democracy and character — and its closing (1890 census) marked an era's end.
The Grange & Farmers' Alliances
Farmer organizations fighting railroads' rates and monopoly — cooperative stores, Granger laws, and the roots of Populism.
Crop Prices & Farm Debt
Overproduction and deflation crushed farmers: falling prices, fixed debts, high rail rates — the grievance engine of the 1890s revolt.
Populist (People's) Party
The 1892 farmer-labor party: free silver, graduated income tax, government ownership of railroads, direct election of senators, subtreasury plan.
Omaha Platform (1892)
The Populists' sweeping program to restore government 'of the people' against 'governmental injustice' breeding 'tramps and millionaires.'
Free Silver Debate
Inflationists demanded silver coinage at 16:1 to raise crop prices and ease debts; 'gold bugs' defended sound money — the 1890s' central battle.
Panic of 1893
A ruinous depression — bank failures, 20% unemployment, Coxey's Army marching on Washington — that discredited Cleveland and fueled Populism.
William Jennings Bryan & 'Cross of Gold' (1896)
Bryan's electrifying convention speech won him the Democratic nomination on a free-silver platform, absorbing the Populists.
Election of 1896
McKinley (gold, tariffs, big-business funding by Mark Hanna) beat Bryan — a realigning victory for urban-industrial Republicanism.
Jim Crow & Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Southern segregation laws received the Court's blessing — 'separate but equal' — as disenfranchisement (poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses) stripped Black voting rights.
Ida B. Wells
Journalist who documented and crusaded against lynching at risk of her life — the era's fiercest voice for racial justice.
Booker T. Washington
Tuskegee's founder urged Black economic self-help and accommodation ('Atlanta Compromise,' 1895) — later challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Gilded Age Politics
Evenly divided parties, massive turnout, spoils and patronage battles (Stalwarts vs. Half-Breeds), and presidents overshadowed by Congress and business.
Pendleton Act (1883)
After Garfield's assassination by a disappointed office-seeker, civil service exams began replacing the spoils system.
Tariff & Currency Politics
The era's party battles centered on tariff levels and gold vs. silver — economic identity politics for industrializing America.
Crédit Mobilier (1872)
Union Pacific insiders' construction company overbilled the railroad and bribed congressmen with stock — the Gilded Age's signature scandal.
Jay Gould & Stock Watering
Speculators like Gould manipulated railroad stocks ('watering' them beyond asset value) — finance as predation.
Panic of 1873
Jay Cooke's collapse triggered a five-year depression — unemployment, wage cuts, and the labor wars of 1877.
Molly Maguires
Irish miners' secret society in Pennsylvania coal country; infiltrated by Pinkertons, twenty were hanged — labor militancy and its repression.
Terence Powderly
The Knights of Labor's leader — preferring arbitration and reform to strikes, he lost control of his own movement's militancy.
Anarchism & the Eight-Hour Movement
The 1886 May Day strikes for the eight-hour day drew radicals and unionists together — until Haymarket's bomb shattered the alliance.
Company Towns & Scrip
Workers housed in company-owned towns (like Pullman) and paid in company scrip lived under their employer's total control.
Contract Labor & Padrones
Immigrant labor recruiters (Italian padrones, Chinese labor bosses) channeled newcomers into railroads, mines, and sweatshops.
Sweatshops & the Garment Trade
Tenement piecework — sewing by families at pennies per garment — defined immigrant labor in New York's needle trades.
Streetcar Suburbs
Electric streetcars let the middle class flee to leafy suburbs, sorting cities by class as the poor stayed in walking-distance wards.
Department Stores & Mail Order
Wanamaker's and Marshall Field's palaces of consumption; Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs brought the store to the farm.
Chautauqua & Self-Improvement
Traveling lecture circuits and correspondence courses fed the era's appetite for education and 'uplift.'
Comstock Lode & Western Mining
Nevada's silver bonanza (1859) set the pattern: rush, boomtown, corporate consolidation, and immigrant deep-shaft labor.
Open-Range Ranching & Barbed Wire
The cattle kingdom's long drives died as barbed wire (Glidden, 1874), railroads, and the 1886–87 winter closed the range.
Chisholm Trail & Cow Towns
Texas herds driven to Kansas railheads — Abilene, Dodge City — for eastern markets; the cowboy's brief heyday.
Sod Houses & Plains Hardship
Treeless plains meant sod-brick homes, buffalo-chip fuel, and battles with drought, blizzards, and locust swarms.
Bonanza Farms
Vast wheat operations in the Dakotas using machinery and hired labor — industrial agriculture's preview.
Oklahoma Land Rush (1889)
'Boomers' and 'Sooners' raced for parcels of former Indian Territory — the land frenzy at the frontier's end.
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)
Colorado militia slaughtered peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho at their encampment — atrocity that ignited Plains warfare.
Red Cloud's War & the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868)
The Sioux forced the Bozeman Trail's abandonment — a rare Native victory, soon betrayed by the Black Hills gold rush.
Chief Joseph & the Nez Percé (1877)
A 1,400-mile fighting retreat toward Canada ended forty miles short: 'I will fight no more forever.'
Geronimo & Apache Resistance
The last armed holdout; his 1886 surrender ended the Indian wars in the Southwest.
Sitting Bull
Lakota leader and spiritual figure at Little Bighorn; killed during the Ghost Dance panic of 1890.
A Century of Dishonor (1881)
Helen Hunt Jackson's exposé of broken treaties stirred reform sentiment — which produced the assimilationist Dawes Act.
Ida B. Wells's Anti-Lynching Crusade
Her Memphis journalism proved lynching punished Black success, not crime; mobs destroyed her press and she carried the fight north and abroad.
Atlanta Compromise (1895)
Booker T. Washington's Cotton States address accepting segregation while urging Black economic self-help — acclaimed by whites, contested by Du Bois.
Disenfranchisement Tools
Poll taxes, literacy tests with 'understanding clauses,' grandfather clauses, and white primaries — race-neutral words, racial results.
Convict Leasing
Southern states leased (mostly Black) prisoners to mines and plantations — slavery reborn through the criminal code.
Civil Rights Cases (1883)
The Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, ruling the 14th Amendment reached only state action — opening the door to private segregation.
Mugwumps
Reform-minded Republicans who bolted to Cleveland in 1884 over Blaine's corruption — respectability politics in the spoils era.
Stalwarts vs. Half-Breeds
Republican factions warring over patronage (Conkling) versus mild reform (Blaine) — the quarrel behind Garfield's assassination.
Grover Cleveland
The era's lone Democrat president (non-consecutive terms): honest, negative-government conservative — vetoes, gold, and tariff reform.
McKinley Tariff (1890) & Wilson-Gorman (1894)
Record-high protection, then a muddled reduction with a (struck-down) income tax — tariffs as the era's endless battlefield.
Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1890)
Doubled silver buying to appease inflationists; repealed in 1893 as gold reserves drained — sound money vs. silver at war.
Coxey's Army (1894)
Jacob Coxey's unemployed marchers demanded public-works jobs; arrested for walking on the Capitol grass — the depression's protest symbol.
Depression of the 1890s
After the Panic of 1893: 20% unemployment, strikes, farm collapse — the crucible of the 1896 realignment.
Immigration Restriction League
Boston elites (1894) demanding literacy tests — 'scientific' nativism targeting southern and eastern Europeans.
Birds of Passage
Immigrants (especially Italian men) who worked seasons in America and returned home — migration as strategy, not always settlement.
Americanization & Public Schools
Cities used compulsory schooling to assimilate immigrant children — English, civics, and Protestant-tinged 'American ways.'
Salvation Army & Urban Missions
Religious charities brought soup, shelter, and salvation to the industrial city's poor.
Dwight Moody & Urban Revivalism
Mass evangelism adapted to the city — business methods in the service of old-time religion.
City Beautiful & Central Park
Olmsted's parks and the 1893 White City inspired movements to redeem cities through planning and grandeur.
World's Columbian Exposition (1893)
Chicago's fair displayed American industrial might and neoclassical dreams — with the midway's exoticism and Turner's frontier eulogy alongside.
Yellowstone & Early Conservation (1872)
The first national park — the countercurrent to the era's resource plunder, expanded by Forest Reserve Act (1891).
John Muir & the Sierra Club (1892)
Preservation's prophet — wilderness as temple, not timber lot — founding the movement TR would empower.
Mark Twain & Realist Literature
Twain, Howells, and the realists turned fiction to ordinary and regional life — the Gilded Age named by its greatest satirist.
Horatio Alger & Success Literature
Dime-novel mobility myths taught boys that luck and pluck won the race — ideology in story form.
Victorian Morality & the WCTU
Frances Willard's Woman's Christian Temperance Union — the era's largest women's organization — linked temperance to suffrage and reform ('Do Everything').
New Woman & Women's Colleges
Vassar, Smith, Wellesley graduates entering professions and reform — the settlement house generation forming.