“The Shame of the Cities” - The Gilded Age (1877 - early 1900s)
Questions:
1. What were the big stories of the Gilded Age?
2. Who was doing well in the Gilded Age?
3. Who was not doing well in the Gilded Age?
Outline:
I. Mark Twain
II. Women: Jane Addams (1860-1935)
A. “Separate Spheres”
B. Toynbee House of London
C. Hull House of Chicago
D. Civic Maternalism
III. Native Americans: Sitting Bull (1831-1890)
A. Indian resistance to the U.S. government fading
B. Strong Heart Warrior Society
C. The Battle of Little Bighorn
D. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
IV. Politicians: Boss William Marcy Tweed (1823-1878)
A. Alderman (city councilman) in New York City
B. Tammany Hall
C. The “spoils” system
D. The New York City Courthouse
V. Businessmen and Workers: Triangle Shirtwaist Company
A. The laborers at the factory
B. Conditions at the Factory
C. March 25, 1911: Fire Breaks Out
D. Triangle Shirtwaist owners on trial
VI. African-Americans: Lynching
A. Reconstruction, 1865-1877
B. Black people in the South, 1877-1890
C. The rise of lynching in the 1890s
D. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
VII. Farmers: Oliver Hudson Kelley (1826-1913)
A. An exciting time to be a farmer?
B. New farming technologies
C. Railroads and Refrigeration
D. The Grangers
1870s
• Mark Twain publishes Tom Sawyer (1877)
• First major league baseball teams (1877)
• Thomas Edison invents the record player (1877)
• In Germany, Karl Benz builds the first automobile
powered by a gasoline engine (1878)
• Henry George documents the plight of the poor in
Progress and Poverty (1879)
1880s
1890s
• Congress bans Chinese immigration to U.S. (1882)
• Brooklyn Bridge is completed, dubbed the “Eighth
Wonder of the World” (1883)
• First skyscraper built, in Chicago (1884)
• Haymarket Square bombing and riots (1884)
• Statue of Liberty unveiled (1886)
• Johnstown Flood kills 2,295 people (1889)
• Western frontier no longer exists (1890)
• James Naismith invents basketball (1891)
• Violent strike at Homestead Steel Mills (1892)
• X-Rays discovered (1895)
• Spanish-American War (1898)
• Austrian Sigmund Freud creates modern psychiatry
with book On the Interpretation of Dreams (1899)