Short Answer
• What are the major characteristics that
define the Gilded Age as a historical era?
Explain your answer using specific examples.
What are the major characteristics that define the Gilded Age
as a historical era? Explain your answer using specific
examples.
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Rapid economic growth generated vast wealth during the Gilded Age
New products and technologies improved middle-class quality of life
Industrial workers and farmers did not share in the new prosperity, working long hours in
dangerous conditions for low pay.
Gilded Age politicians were largely corrupt and ineffective
Most Americans during the Gilded Age wanted political and social reforms, but the disagreed on
what to do
Laissez-faire
Westward movement and the Homestead Act
Cattle industry boom
Completion of transcontinental railroad
Labor unions
Indian policies
Entrepreneurship - growth of big business
Political corruption and political machines
Urbanization - migration to cities
Immigration to US - nativism
Factory systems
Short Answer
• Describe how immigration, urbanization, and
industrialization are all related, and how they
each impacted American cities during the
Gilded Age.
Describe how immigration, urbanization, and
industrialization are all related, and how they each
impacted American cities during the Gilded Age.
• Increased Immigration (Chinese and new immigrants,
ethnic neighborhoods, tenement houses, unskilled
workers, nativist fear of losing jobs, settlement houses,
Americanization movement)  Urbanization (political
machines, availability of unskilled jobs, need for
infrastructure improvements create jobs and more
housing)  Industrialization (factory production,
working conditions, lack of job security)
• * important to know the effects of EACH concept
(above in parenthesis) , but also how the concepts
create a cause/effect chain and are interdependent