Advanced Search

Current Criteria

    ›› Coverage People : Andrew Carnegie

Refine your search

Refine your search by adding another term. Type 'all' to view all options for the category.

Filter by Content Type.

Did not find what you were looking for?
return to the basic search, search for multimedia, or search the collection

Showing results 11 – 17 of 17

Glossary Term – Event

Homestead Steel Strike

In response to falling steel prices, Henry C. Frick, the general manager of Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, cut wages and attempted to quash the workers’ Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The workers protested, and Frick closed the mills and refused to negotiate with the union, declaring that he would only deal with individual workers. The workers tried to appeal to Carnegie, who had defended unionization, but Carnegie made himself unavailable. The workers voted to strike, and Frick hired a private...

Glossary Term – Organization

Pinkerton Agency

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private security force, was often hired to put down strikes during the labor disputes of the late nineteenth century. Most famously, the Pinkerton Agency clashed with strikers at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel plant outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1892.

Glossary Term – Organization

US Steel Corporation

United States Steel was created in 1901 by the merger of the companies of John Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Elbert M. Gary, and Charles Schwab. The first corporation capitalized at more than a billion dollars, US Steel was subject to several strikes, including the general steel strike of 1919, and in 1920 the Supreme Court ruled that the company was not a monopoly. In 1937, however, US Steel began to recognize unions such as the United Steelworkers of America.

Glossary Term – Person

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie opened America’s largest steel plant in 1875 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An industrialist born in Scotland, Carnegie was a self-made man who had worked in textiles and railroads as a young man. Carnegie made a fortune in the steel industry but also made a name for himself as a philanthropist. In 1889, he published “The Gospel of Wealth,” an essay extolling the benefits of wealth as well as the responsibilities of the wealthy to the public.

Glossary Term – Person

Charles Schwab

Andrew Carnegie to Hiram Hitchcock, January 31, 1889 (Gilder Lehrman Collection)

Primary Source

Building Carnegie Hall, 1889

In early 1889, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was working on plans for...

Teaching Resource

Guided Readings: The Gospel of Wealth

Reading 1

Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done itself.

—Andrew Carnegie

Reading 2

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the...