Download - St. Mary School

Changing Society Study Guide
Vocabulary
lode transcontinental vigilante subsidy reservation wholesale gauge transatlantic
stock
corporation network consolidate pool dividend trust monopoly patent sweatshop anarchist
trade union pogrom steerage nativist urbanization tenement suburb diversity density
gilded muckraker
Things to know
Ellis Island Statue of Liberty Erie Canal The Chinese Exclusion Act The Gentlemen’s Agreement
Tammany Hall Knights of Labor American Federation of Labor
Gilded Age
Angel Island
International Workers of the World. Haymarket affair
Pullman Strike The Jungle Ghost Dance
Wounded Knee International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union strike. Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Chivington Massacre
People of significance
Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, W. E. B. du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida Tarbell, Eugene V. Debs
Jacob Riis Booker T. Washington Upton Sinclair Boss Tweed John Chivington Sitting Bull
Geronimo James Garfield Chester A. Arthur Grover Cleveland Benjamin Harrison
Charles J. Guiteau
Native American Conflicts
An editorial following the death of Sitting Bull
"The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best
safety of the frontier settlers will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."
Saturday Pioneer, L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
Beginning in the 1860s, a 30 year conflict arose as the government sought to concentrate the Native
American tribes on reservations.
Chivington Massacre
1. In 1864, warfare spread to Colorado, after the discovery of gold led to an influx of whites onto Indian
land. On November 29, 1864, a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M.
Chivington, fell on an unsuspecting band of Cheyennes at Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. The militia
slaughtered about 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children.
Custer’s Last Stand
2. In 1868, the federal government demanded that the Plains Indians give up their lands and move to
reservations. In return for supplies and annuities, the southern Plains Indians were told to move to poor,
unproductive lands in Oklahoma and the northern tribes to the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The alternative
to acceptance was warfare.
In 1871, thousands of miners staked claims on Sioux lands, war erupted, in which an Indian force led by
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull killed General George Custer and his 264 men at the Battle of the Little Big
Horn.
Wounded Knee
3. Deprived of their homelands, their revolts suppressed, and their way of life besieged, many Plains
Indians dreamed of restoring a vanished past, free of hunger, disease, and bitter warfare. Beginning in the
1870s, a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance arose among Indians of the Great Basin. Fearful
that the Ghost Dance would lead to a Sioux uprising, army officials ordered Indian police to arrest the
Sioux leader Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull resisted, he was killed. In the ensuing panic, his followers
fled the Sioux reservation. Federal troops tracked down the Indians and took them to a cavalry camp on
Wounded Knee Creek.
There, on December 29, 1890, one of the most brutal incidents in American history took place. While
soldiers disarmed the Sioux, someone fired a gun. The soldiers responded by using machine guns to
slaughter over 200 Indian men, women, and children.
Wounded Knee marked the end of three centuries of bitter warfare between Indians and whites. Indians
had been confined to small reservations, where reformers would seek to transform them into Christian
farmers.
Geronimo
4. While out on a trading trip, Mexican soldiers attacked the camp of Geronimo a Chiricahua Apache.
When Geronimo returned home, he found his mother, wife and three children all dead. Geronimo rounded
up a force of 200 men and hunted down the Mexican soldiers who killed his family.
Following the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the U.S. took over large tracts of territory from
Mexico, including areas belonging to the Apache. Spurred by the discovery of gold in the Southwest,
settlers and miners streamed into Apache lands. Naturally, tensions mounted. The Apaches stepped up
their attacks, which included brutal ambushes on stagecoaches and wagon trains. After years of war,
Apache Chief Cochise and the Americans government agreed to the establishment of a reservation for his
people on a prized piece of Apache property.
The federal government reneged on its agreement, and moved the Chiricahua north so that white settlers
could move into their former lands. In September 1881, Geronimo and a small band of Chiricahua
followers escaped the reservation. Over the next five years they engaged in what proved to be the last of
the Indian wars against the U.S. Geronimo was transformed into a legend as newspapers closely followed
the Army's pursuit of him. At one point nearly a quarter of the Army's forces were trying to hunt him
down. Finally1886, he surrendered, the last Chiricahua to do so.
The Progressive Era--Gilded Age and Growing Economy
The Progressive Era was a period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during which
social, economic, and political reforms aimed to end the dominance of large businesses and
wealthy business owners and increase equity and opportunity for the less affluent members of
American society, including recent immigrants. Although the era had no firm beginning or
ending dates, historians generally consider it to have lasted from around 1890 to sometime in
the 1920s.
The Progressive reform movement began in response to the rapid industrialization that had
been sweeping much of the country since the Civil War. Urbanization and industrialization
enriched the country as a whole but had created increasingly impoverished classes of workers,
who often lived in urban slums and worked in unsafe factories.
Industrialists and financiers who owned and funded the manufacturing companies were often
referred to as Robber Barons. These wealthy individuals including Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P.
Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie controlled most of the nation’s wealth.
During this era, many corporations consolidated into trusts, or mega-corporations that controlled
nearly all of the manufacturing and distribution in a particular industry. The Panic of 1893 was
primarily the result of speculating on business opportunities that did not yet exist.
The souring economy led many people to withdraw their money from banks, meaning that the banks
could no longer offer credit. Banks failed, and many railroads and manufacturing companies collapsed as
well. Unemployment skyrocketed. Many people lost their homes and life savings.
During the Progressive Era, women began working for social and political causes in
much greater numbers. Many women, primarily from the middle and upper classes,
joined Progressive organizations and became leaders in reforms regarding child labor,
urban sanitation, education, and other social issues.
Progressive reformers also frequently viewed reform as a way of increasing the
“moral behavior” of immigrants and the working class, whom they often viewed as coarse and
indecent.
Immigration and Urbanization ---- New York
The demand for labor in urban industrial areas resulted in increased migration from rural areas and a rapid
increase in immigration to the United States. New York City became the nation’s largest city and other
New York cities experienced growth at this time.
With the Potato Famine (1845–1849) in Ireland driving them, the Irish emigrated directly to the U. S
from their homeland to escape poverty and death.
The Revolutions of 1848, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848 in which 50
countries were affected
Six factors were involved:
1. dissatisfaction with political leadership;
2. demands for more participation in government and democracy;
3. demands for freedom of press;
4. the demands of the working classes;
5. the upsurge of nationalism
6. the social class system based on the royalty, the aristocracy, the army, the church and the peasants.[4]
The revolutions were most important in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the
Austrian Empire, but did not reach Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, and most of southern Europe.
After 1880 larger steam-powered oceangoing ships replaced older sailing ships, which resulted in lower
fares and greater immigrant mobility. Meanwhile farming improvements due to the Industrial Revolution
in southern Europe and the Russian Empire created surplus labor. During this wave of migration, nearly
25 million Europeans made the long trip to the U.S. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others
speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 4
million Jews.
Groups of people who moved into urban areas included
1. Freedmen and their families looking to leave behind the segregated South and find new opportunities in
urban areas.
2. European immigrants reuniting with family and leaving poor conditions in their homelands.
Opportunities in unskilled labor and ethnic familiarity were two main reasons for their migration into the
cities by immigrants and African Americans.
In 1886, the Statue of Liberty was unveiled at the entrance of New York Harbor. A gift from France, the
statue stood a half mile from Ellis Island, the location in which immigrants were processed for clearance
to enter the country and the reception point for more than 12 million European immigrants from 1892 to
1924. In the examination room, newcomers were questioned by government officials and examined by
doctors before being allowed into the country.
Upon arriving in New York City, most immigrants found themselves moving into the one of the many
ethnic neighborhoods on the Lower East Side of the city ( Astor Place, Kleindeutschland (Little
Germany), Alphabet City, Five Point, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Bowery)
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants settled in New York City and other growing cities such as
Philadelphia and Chicago. Encountering hostility from native-born Americans upon arriving in the
country, most immigrants had nowhere to turn. They moved into poverty stricken neighborhoods and into
neglected buildings known as tenements.
Rural settlements in the Midwest
After the Civil War, when the transatlantic journey became far cheaper, immigrants to the United States
were increasingly drawn from the ranks of Europe's rural poor; destitute peasants, tenants, farm laborers,
and servants. With the passage of the 1862 Homestead Act, frontier land in the U. S. was virtually free.
For this reason, immigrants also began rural settlements in the Midwest.
It was rare for Italian and Jewish immigrants to become farmers, but very common for Norwegian and
German-Russian immigrants to do so. Due to their great numbers, German immigrants probably had the
greatest impact on rural America.
Chinese communities in the Far West
The Chinese came to the United States for reasons similar to those of most immigrants. Yet there were
others that were compelled to leave China either as contract laborers or refugees. During this period,
thousands of Chinese, mostly young male peasants, left their villages in the rural countries to become
laborers in the American West. They were recruited to extract metals and minerals, construct a vast
railroad network, build irrigation systems, work as migrant agricultural laborers, develop the fishing
industry, and operate highly-competitive manufacturing industries. Racist feelings led the
U.S. Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. The act prohibited Chinese
laborers and miners from entering the country for the next ten years. It also specified that Chinese already
in the United States could not become citizens.
The Gentlemen’s Agreement An increase Japanese immigration was placing a strain on
California’s economy and society. On May 7, 1905, California organized the Japanese and Korean
Exclusion League and on October 11, 1906, the San Francisco school board arranged for all Asian
children to be placed in a segregated school. The Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United States and
Japan in 1907-1908 represented an effort by President Theodore Roosevelt to calm growing tension
between the two countries over the immigration of Japanese workers. The segregation was lifted and
Japan agreed to place more restrictions on their emigrants.
Mexican communities in the Southwest. The rapid growth of mining, railroads, and large-scale
commercial agriculture in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Southwest could not
have occurred without low-cost labor from Mexico. Many Mexican immigrants lived in isolated mining
towns or worked as migratory farm laborers or railroad construction workers. Even in cities, they tended
to live in segregated neighborhoods. Distinctive words describe these many communities. Rural
communities called colonias were located near agricultural or railroad work camps. Barrios were
segregated urban neighborhoods
Erie Canal (1825)
The Erie Canal sparked an economic revolution. Before the canal was built, it cost $100 and took 20 days
to transport a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City. After the canal was opened, the cost fell to
$5 a ton and transit time was reduced to 6 days.
It also became an "information superhighway" for new ideas. Social reforms like abolitionism, women's
rights, utopianism, and various religious movements thrived in the canal corridor.
As more commerce with western New York became a reality, the importance of New York City as an
Atlantic port multiplied. Western farmers, loggers, miners, and manufacturers found their goods could
reach farther than ever before. Shipping and trade, and society in general, in New York City flourished.
The effects of rapid growth in cities
As urban areas grew many problems arose, including the absence of clean drinking water, the
pressing need for cheap public transportation, and most importantly, poor sanitation. Sanitation problems
led to heavy urban mortality rates and frequent typhoid, dysentery, typhus, cholera, and yellow fever
epidemics.
Migrants came from many different countries and located all in the same region. The interaction of
languages and cultures throughout the cities was immense. Through religion they built churches or
religious temples, through culture, markets arose with the foods of their homeland.