question

Which of the following describes the Gilded Age?

answer

It was an era marked by personal greed and a corrupt partnership between business and politics.

question

Which of the following developments was a key factor in the rise of the Gilded Age?

answer

growth of industrialization in the U.S.

question

Which of the following big businesses came to dominate American life in the second half of the nineteenth century?

answer

Railroading

question

Which of the following factors boosted nineteenth-century railroad construction in America significantly?

answer

monetary and land grants from federal and state governments

question

How was it possible that Jay Gould was described as both the world's richest man and the most hated man in America when he died in 1892?

answer

He was a symbol of all the most troubling aspects of big businesses in America.

question

Which relatively new building material improved railroading in the late nineteenth century and depended on it?

answer

Steel produced through the Bessemer process

question

What was the purpose of vertical integration, which was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century?

answer

It placed all aspects of a business under the control of a chief operating officer.

question

Carnegie Steel achieved the tremendous productivity that Andrew Carnegie insisted on

answer

by forcing employees to work long hours under extremely dangerous conditions for low pay.

question

What was the main purpose of crude oil in the United States before the advent of the automobile?

answer

lubrication and kerosene

question

Which statement describes the oil industry before John D. Rockefeller's rise to power?

answer

Low entry costs allowed riotous competition.

question

Why was Standard Oil first organized as a trust?

answer

to control key elements of production and corner the market for oil

question

Why did Rockefeller ultimately reorganize Standard Oil as a holding company in the late nineteenth century?

answer

to legally combine competing companies

question

Which of the following was true of Standard Oil in the 1890s?

answer

It controlled more than 90% of the oil industry.

question

In her 'History of the Standard Oil Company' published in McClure's Magazine, Ida M. Tarbell characterized John D. Rockefeller as

answer

a man who used illegal methods to take over the oil industry

question

How did Alexander Graham Bell's telephone revolutionize both communications and business in America?

answer

It used a complicated organizational structure in his new company that allowed local and cross-country communication.

question

Where had electricity been put to use in the United States by the late nineteenth century?

answer

Mostly urban areas

question

The industries that grew up around the revolutionary inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated that

answer

the age of the inventor was becoming the age of the corporation.

question

The turn of the twentieth century saw individual entrepreneurship in the United States to yield to

answer

financed capitalism

question

Prominent business leader of the late nineteenth century J.P. Morgan believed that

answer

consolidation and central control were preferable to competition.

question

How did Morgan achieve his stunning reorganization and consolidation of businesses in the late nineteenth century?

answer

He formed a community of interest comprised of a handful of directors.

question

Morgan acquired the core of what would be the largest corporation in the world when he purchased

answer

steel interests formerly controlled by Andrew Carnegie.

question

What idea was promoted by the theory of social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century?

answer

Progress is the result of competition, and social reforms and other modes of human interference impede progress.

question

Who wrote the social Darwinist book "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other"?

answer

William Graham Sumner

question

What message did Andrew Carnegie promote in his gospel of wealth?

answer

Millionaires should be trustees and agents for the poor.

question

According to American businessmen who subscribed to the economic theory of laissez-faire, what was the role of the government in the economy?

answer

It should not interfere with economic affairs except to protect private property.

question

The economic theory of laissez-faire gained political clout in the late nineteenth century because

answer

the Supreme Court increasingly was reinterpreting the Constitution to protect businesses.

question

Which of the following factors explains the high voter turnout in national elections during the last three decades of the nineteenth century?

answer

Voting was an important way to get a government job.

question

To what did the term "solid South" refer in the decades after Reconstruction?

answer

The states of the Old Confederacy, which voted Democratic in every election for the next 70 years

question

What was evident in the call for a New South in the decades after Reconstruction?

answer

the desire among some southerners to shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one

question

Where did the South's iron and steel industry develop?

answer

Birmingham, Alabama

question

What was the outcome of the notion that black men were a threat to white women in the South in the late nineteenth century?

answer

an increasing number of lynchings across the South

question

According to Ida B. Wells, lynching was a problem rooted in

answer

gender as well as race.

question

How did American women respond to the denial of their right to vote in the late nineteenth century?

answer

Women participated in the political process through the antilynching, suffrage, and temperance movements.

question

The presidents who served in the last part of the nineteenth century--Rutherford B. Hayes through William McKinley--

answer

were overshadowed by business development and party politics at state and local levels.

question

Which group of Republicans fiercely supported the patronage system?

answer

Stall warts

question

How did the Republican party attempt to foster unity for the election of 1880?

answer

It nominated a stall wart, Chester A. Arthur, for vice president. (Presidential candidate: a mud womp)

question

President James A. Garfield unwittingly helped the cause of civil service reform when he

answer

was shot by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker

question

The Pendleton Act of 1883 established the Civil Service Commission and

answer

made it impossible to remove people in civil service jobs for political reasons.

question

What was an important consequence of the civil service reform of the 1880s?

answer

Business became even more influential in politics than before.

question

Having stated that "the paramount issue this year is moral rather than political," supporters of Grover Cleveland in 1884 were chagrined to learn that Cleveland had

answer

fathered a child out of wedlock.

question

Why were Irish Catholic voters offended by James G. Blaine's campaign?

answer

Blaine neglected to respond to a slur on Catholic voters.

question

The tariff posed a threat to America's prosperity in the late 1880s because

answer

it created a surplus that was not used to produce goods and services.

question

Which group enthusiastically supported the tariff in the nineteenth century?

answer

Industrialists

question

Democrats dubbed the Republican-dominated Fifty-first Congress the "Billion Dollar Congress" because it spent the nation's surplus on

answer

lawmakers' own constituents

question

The Supreme Court's decision in Wabash vs. Illinois (1886), which reversed its ruling in Munn vs. Illinois (1877),

answer

led to the passage of the first federal law regulating the railroad industry.

question

How effective was the Interstate Commerce Commission, the nation's first federal regulatory agency?

answer

It was so weak in its early years that it served as little more than a historical precedent.

question

What did the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act have in common?

answer

They testified to the nation's growing willingness to intervene in big business on behalf of the public interest.

question

The Greenback Labor party believed that the government should issue paper currency based on

answer

the country's total wealth.

question

When advocates of bimetallism referred to the crime of '73, they were talking about

answer

the decision by Congress in 1873 to stop buying and mining silver.

question

President Grover Cleveland hoped to increase the nation's flagging gold reserves during the economic depression in the winter of 1894-95

answer

through making a deal with a private group of bankers, headed by J.P. Morgan, to purchase gold abroad and supply it to the goverment.

question

What late-nineteenth-century development did New York City's Brooklyn Bridge symbolize?

answer

the ascendancy of urban America

question

By 1900, the population in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia had each grown to exceed

answer

1,000,000 people

question

Which of the following factors contributed significantly to the astonishing growth in America's urban population between 1870 and 1900?

answer

European migration to the United States

question

Which of the following describes the world economy at the turn of the twentieth century?

answer

An industrial core, an agricultural domain, and a third-world tied to the industrial core by economic colonialism

question

What circumstances enabled U.S. industrialists to hire cheap labor from around the world in the 1870s?

answer

Railroad expansion and low steamship fares brought many immigrants to America.

question

After 1880, most new immigrants to America orginiated from

answer

eastern and southern Europe.

question

Which of the following describes the majority of immigrants' lifestyles in the United States after 1900?

answer

They lived in cities because jobs were available there and because they did not have the money to buy land.

question

How did most new women immigrants come to the United States in the late nineteenth-century?

answer

as wives, mothers, or daughters

question

The racism directed at ethnic immigrant groups in America in the late nineteenth century

answer

were based on the perception that ethnic and religious differences were racial characteristics

question

In the late nineteenth century, some established immigrant groups viewed more recent immigrants as

answer

not being a part of the white race.

question

Southern blacks migrated to northern cities in the 1890s

answer

for economic opportunities and safety

question

Which statement describes the immigrant experience in the late-nineteenth-century American cities?

answer

They generally lacked the capital to buy land.

question

Why did Congress approve a literacy test for immigrants in 1896?

answer

as a means of limiting the influx of uneducated people into the country

question

Along with the horse car, which mode of transportation first allowed late-nineteenth-century cities to expand into the suburbs?

answer

electric street car

question

As middle- and upper-class urbanites moved to new areas of their cities in the late nineteenth century, poor city dwellers

answer

stayed in the neighborhoods near the factories

question

What did Jacob Riis achieve with his best-selling "How the Other Half Lives" (1890)?

answer

He forced middle-class Americans to acknowledge the degraded reality of the poor.

question

Which group constituted the backbone of the American labor force throughout the nineteenth century?

answer

Unskilled laborers

question

Working as a skilled craftsman in America in the late nineteenth century

answer

did not ensure financial security.

question

Employers sought to limit the control of skilled workers on the shop floor in the nineteenth century

answer

by replacing skilled workers with machines.

question

Which of the following developments changed the U.S. garment industry in the 1850s?

answer

Independent tailors were replaced by sweatshop workers.

question

Which of the following describes the economic survival of the nineteenth-century American working class family?

answer

Family's surrvival depended on employment.

question

How did the percentage of children under age fifteen working in the paid labor force in the United States change during the years leading up to World War I?

answer

The percentage increased dramatically.

question

Where did married black women typically work to supplement their family income in the late nineteenth century United States?

answer

outside the home as domestics

question

How did business expansion and consolidation affect the social structure in the late-nineteenth-century United States?

answer

A new class of white-male-salaried managers emerged.

question

The direction of corporate goals and policies in the late nineteenth century was increasingly shaped by

answer

managers and executives

question

The advent of the adding machine, typewriter, and cash register had the greatest impact on

answer

literate white women

question

Most native-born white women who worked at the end of the nineteenth century held

answer

clerical jobs in offices

question

What developed as a result of the opening of department stores in the late-nineteenth-century United States?

answer

a new consumer culture

question

What was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?

answer

the result of a coalition of labor unions

question

What was the main lesson learned by workers from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?

answer

They lacked power individually, but they might gain it through a union.

question

What was the "Chicago school" of the late nineteenth century?

answer

a school of architecture active in Chicago*

question

During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor advocated for

answer

public ownership on the railroads, an income tax, equal pay for women, and the abolition of child labor

question

What happened to the World's Columbian Exposition site after it closed its doors in October 1894?

answer

It became an area for Chicago's unemployed and homeless.

question

What was the White City, which was constructed in 1893, five miles down the shore from Chicago?

answer

the home of the Columbian Exchange

question

By the turn of the twentieth century, most big-city governments were run

answer

by compromise and the accommodation of various powerful political forces.

question

In the post-Civil War United States, a "city boss" was

answer

the overseer of the building of the city and provided social services for new residents.

question

Which of the following describes the amenities of American city life in the 1890s?

answer

The amenities were not easily available to the poor residents in the cities.

question

Which statement describes late-nineteenth-century American libraries?

answer

They made up the most extensive free public-library system in the world.

question

What did the public school system in the late-nineteenth-century American cities provide?

answer

Free tuition and open access to all children

question

New York City's Central Park was planned to provide

answer

a natural oasis away from the busyness of the city.

question

What development led to the emergence of the modern skyscraper in the 1890s?

answer

the advent of structural steel

question

What did Coney Island symbolize in the late 1800s?

answer

the rise of mess entertainment in America

question

Beginning in the 1870s, American men of all classes were united in their passion for

answer

baseball.

question

Working-class courtship rituals in urban, industrial America in the late nineteenth century

answer

shifted from family-arranged arrangements to informal meetings at the dance halls and other commercial retreats

question

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, middle-class American women were confined by a cultural ideology that dictated that they

answer

exist within the private sphere of the household.

question

Which statement describes the Haymarket affair of 1886?

answer

It began as a rally of laborers organized by radicals.

question

Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor,

answer

focused on higher pay and better working conditions.

question

Which of the following was an outcome of the Haymarket affair?

answer

Skilled workers turned toward the American Federation of Labor.

question

How did live-in servants change households in the North by 1870?

answer

They enabled middle-class white women to explore opportunities outside the home.

question

What was the Knights of Labor?

answer

an American labor organization founded in 1869 to protect the rights of workers.

Flashcards on History Chapters 18 & 19

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