62 items
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Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross - "A Black Women's History of the United States"
Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kali Nicole Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies at Emory...
Eric Foner, Kathleen DuVal, and Lisa McGirr - "Give Me Liberty! An American History"
Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lisa McGirr is a Charles Warren Professor of American...
Richard White - "Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University"
Richard White is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus at Stanford University. Order Who Killed Jane Stanford at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Rise of the Populists and William Jennings Bryan
Historical Background As the United States evolved into an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the Civil War, the growing strength of the railroads and the banks particularly, coupled with the impact of mechanization on...
The United States and the Caribbean, 1877–1920
Between 1877 and 1920, the United States’ relationship with the Caribbean region underwent a profound change, which was closely tied to the transformation of the United States to an industrial and imperial power. Although the Civil...
Official photograph from the "Golden Spike" Ceremony, 1869
This iconic photograph records the celebration marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad lines at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad,...
Jean Pfaelzer- "California, a Slave State"
Jean Pfaelzer is a public historian, commentator, and professor of American studies at the University of Delaware. Order California, a Slave State at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
George Pullman: His Impact on the Railroad Industry, Labor, and American Life in the Nineteenth Century
Background George Mortimer Pullman was an influential industrialist of the nineteenth century and the founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company. His innovations brought comfort and luxury to railroad travel in the 1800s with the...
Statistics: Agriculture in America
Farm Production Year Number of Farms* Bales of Cotton* Bushels of Corn* Bushels of Wheat* Price Index 1860=100 1860 2 3.8 839 173 100 1870 2.7 4.4 760 254 140 1880 4 6.6 1,706 502 100 1890 4.6 8.7 2,125 449 90 1900 5.7 10.1 2,662 599...
The Haymarket Affair, 1886
The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans. On May 3,...
The Transcontinental Railroad in Images and Poetry
Unit Objectives Students will analyze a variety of primary sources related to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. investigate celebratory images and a poem to discover some of the key outcomes that arose from the ability...
Railroads: The "Engine" to Promote National Unity and Economic Growth
Objectives Students will examine, explain, and evaluate a variety of literary and visual primary sources that describe and depict the development and impact of railroads on sectional relationships, national unity, and economic growth...
William Cullen Bryant opposes the protective tariff, 1876
During the Civil War, the United States needed to raise funds urgently. It did so by raising the tariff, which taxed goods imported from other countries. In the days before the national income tax, the United States depended on the...
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham - "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans"
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Order From Slavery to Freedom at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate...
Ken Burns - "Our America: A Photographic History"
Ken Burns, the producer and director of numerous film series, including The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and Country Music , founded his own documentary film company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His landmark film, The Civil War ,...
Pioneering New Methods to Expand Voting, 1865–1920
Paragraphs
> Access this essay as a PDF , including key vocabulary terms and discussion questions, or read the text of the essay below. A new chapter in voting rights began when the Civil War ended in 1865....
Morgan: American Financier
Based on extensive research in newly opened archives, Morgan: American Financier , Jean Strouse’s portrait of J. P. Morgan, shows a man who helped transform the United States into an industrial nation, and amassed an extraordinary...
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
Thomas G. Andrews, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, discusses his Bancroft Prize–winning book, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, and the interconnection between railroads, coal,...
"Locomotive"
It is the summer of 1869, and trains, crews, and family are traveling together, riding America’s brand-new transcontinental railroad. These pages come alive with the details of the trip and the sounds, speed, and strength of the...
"Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story"
Gittel and her mother were supposed to immigrate to America together, but when her mother is stopped by the health inspector, Gittel must make the journey alone. Her mother writes her cousin’s address in New York on a piece of paper....
New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age
Vassar College historian Rebecca Edwards discusses some of the complexities of the Gilded Age with Gilder Lehrman President James Basker. Professor Edwards's 2006 study, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, offers a nuanced view...
Populism and Agrarian Discontent
Today, the Gilded Age evokes thoughts of “robber baron” industrialists, immigrants toiling long hours in factories for little pay, massive strikes that were often put down by force, and political corruption in both big cities and the...
Immigration and Migration
The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
The Gilded Age
When I was a college student in the late 1960s, the most popular US history courses were the ones that covered the Gilded Age. They promised to illuminate the origins of urgent contemporary problems. Their canvas was broad and filled...
The Development of the West
In the summer of 1876, two dramatically different places captured the American nation’s attention. As the summer began, fairgoers in Philadelphia teemed into the Centennial Exhibition held to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary...
The Rise of Industrial America, 1877-1900
When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age , they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner...
Empire Building
The years between the end of the Civil War, in 1865, and the end of the century witnessed rapid and far-reaching change in the economic and social life of the United States. During those years, the nation was transformed from rural...
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants
Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come...
Mary Elizabeth Lease: Populist Reformer
Blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes is not a new idea in American history. Over a century ago, Mary Elizabeth Lease, the best-known orator of the Populist era, asserted, "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a...
Emma Goldman on the restriction of civil liberties, 1919
Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights,...
Statistics: Trends in American Farming
Percentage of Labor Force in Agriculture 1860 53% 1870 52% 1880 51% 1890 43% 1900 40% 1910 31% 1920 26% 1930 21% Farming Profession Number of Farms (in thousands) Proportion of Total Population 1940 6,350 23.1% 1950 5,648 15.2% 1960 3...
Guided Readings: The Rise of the City
Reading 1 To-day, what is a tenement? . . . When last arraigned before the bar of public justice: “It is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor which, when...
Guided Readings: Progressive Reform and the Trusts
Reading 1 The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and arrogance . . . and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular mind,...
Guided Readings: The Changing Status of Women
Reading 1 Man is or should be woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . .The paramount destiny and...
Guided Readings: Imperialism and the Spanish-American War
Reading 1 Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. . . . The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. . . . The frontier promoted the...
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...
Guided Readings: Urban Political Machines
Reading 1 An army led by a council seldom conquers: It must have a commander-in-chief who settles disputes, decides in emergencies, inspires fear or attachment. The head of the Ring is such a commander. He dispenses places, rewards...
Guided Readings: The Farmers' Revolt
Reading 1 For our business interests, we desire to bring producers and consumers, farmers and manufacturers into the most direct and friendly relations possible. Hence we must dispense with a surplus of middlemen, not that we are...
Guided Readings: Responses to Industrialism
Reading 1 It is idle to talk of a peaceful strike. None such has ever occurred. All combinations to interfere with perfect freedom in the proper management and control of one's lawful business, to dictate the terms upon which such...
The struggle for married women’s rights, circa 1880s
In the early nineteenth century, married women in the US were legally subordinate to their husbands. Wives could not own their own property, keep their own wages, or enter into contracts. Beginning in 1839, states slowly began to...
Anti-corporate cartoons, ca. 1900
These cartoons illustrate the growing hostility toward the practices of the big businesses that fueled the industrial development of the United States. In "The Protectors of Our Industries" (1883), railroad magnates Jay Gould and...
John Mosby on the silver issue, 1895
In the late nineteenth century, Democrats and Republicans fought over whether the gold standard ought to be retained or if the United States should switch to a free silver system. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed,...
Historical Context: Why Do People Migrate?
In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors....
Statistics: The Growth of Cities
Urban Growth Number of Cities 1860 1900 100,000-499,999 7 32 500,000 or more 2 6 Percent of Total Population 1860 1900 100,000-499,999 4% 8% 500,000 or more 4% 11% Questions for Discussion What factors contributed to the growth of...
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