American Literature

• Captains of industry were business leaders whose means of amassing a personal fortune contributed positively to the country in some way.Contrasted with the term 'robber baron' as described industrialists who benefitted society.
• Sherman Antitrust Act, 1890 - A law that prohibits certain business activities that federal government regulators deem to be anticompetitive, and that requires the federal government to investigate and pursue trusts. In order to prevent single companies from developing a monopoly over an entire industry, public officials during this era put passing and enforcing strong antitrust laws high on their agenda.
• President Benjamin Harrison, 1889, condemned monopolies as 'dangerous conspiracies' and called for legislation to address the tendency of monopolies to 'crush out' competition
• Tenement Housing act 1901 A reform of the Progressive Era. New York State law that banned the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in NY. Law required new buildings must be built with outward-facing windows in every room, open courtyard, indoor toilets and fire safeguards.
• Why people immigrated to America:

  Nearly 25 million immigrants arrived in the US after 1870. Young people between the ages of 15 and 30 dominated. Immigrants provided a workforce to power the new factories and industries of cities. However, many states and even the federal govt created anti-immigrant legislation.
• The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) suspended all immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of 10 years. This was renewed several times until it became permanent in 1904.
• The working woman:

  Industrial Revolution changed nature of work for women in Europe and other countries of the Western world, as looking for a wage, and eventually a salary, became part of urban life.

  
  

  During the 1910s and 1920s, women delayed childbirth for economic opportunities that were present in urban areas.

  
  

  A study of women graduates in 20th century concluded that those graduating between 1900 and 1920s had to make 'a distinct choice between family and career.'
• National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA): Founded in 1890 by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It aimed to secure voting rights for women through peaceful means such as lobbying politicians and organizing rallies. By 1917, NAWSA claimed to have 2 million members.
• Social Darwinism is the name given to various theories emerging in the UK, North America, and western Europe in the 1870s that claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics.
• Herbert Spencer and John Fiske are examples of social Darwinists who helped shape American social Darwinism.
• William Graham Summer believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for survival was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival.
• The great majority of American businessmen rejected the anti-philanthropic implications of the theory.
• Instead of rejecting the theory, American businessmen gave millions of dollars to build schools, colleges, hospitals and many other institutions.
• • American realism was, in the arts, a style characterised by the depiction of subjects as they exist in objective reality, without embellishment and interpretation.Prominent realist writers include, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells.
• Naturalism not only depicted its subjects realistically but also emphasised the role of the social conditions, heredity, and environment in the development of one's character
• the Reconstruction era was from 1865-1877
•  The Gilded Age (1870-1900) refers to the period following Reconstruction, when the American economy grew at its fastest rate in history.Term coined by Mark Twain in 1873.
• US economy in the 1880s By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double those of Germany or France, and 50 percent higher than those of Britain.The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe.

  Rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly.
• The Second Industrial revolution:Large corporations or trusts managed the manufacturing of raw materials such as coal, iron, and oil.Improvements in workflow, such as mass production and scientific management, contributed greatly to economic growth.

  Also known as the "Technological Revolution," this phase lasted from the 1860s until World War I. It began with the innovation of Bessemer steel and culminated in mass production and the production line.
• Transcontinental Railroads:Know as the 'Pacific Railroad' when it opened, the railroad served as a vital link for trade, commerce, and travel and opened up vast regions of the North American heartland for settlement.

  A term for a contiguous railroad line constructed in the US between 1863 and 1869 west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to connect the Pacific coast as San Francisco Bay with the existing eastern U.S rail network at Council Buffs, Iowa.
• The Homestead Act: The act provided free land to settlers who agreed to live on their property for five years and make improvements to it. This law helped settle the western territories and encouraged immigration into the country.
• The Sherman Antitrust Act: Passed in 1890, this legislation aimed to prevent monopolistic practices among businesses and protect competition within industries.
• 1917 - Immigration Act (literacy act) 

  All immigrants must be able to prove that they can read English, banned all immigration from Asia and charged an immigration fee of $8. 
• The Red Scare:

  Brief period of mass anti-communist paranoia in the U.S., during which several legislatures passed anti-red statutes that often violated the right to free speech. 

  The first Red Scare was a fear of revolution - Marxism was becoming popular amongst workers after the 1917 Russian revolution. Communism threatens traditional American social values. 

   
• Quota Act (1921)

  The emergency act restricted the number of immigrants to 357,000 per year, and set down an immigration quota by which only 3 per cent of the total population of any ethnic group already in the USA in 1910, could be admitted to America after 1921. 
• The Great Internal Migration (1900 – 1970):

  
  

  lack of economic opportunity in the South led to internal migration from the early 20th Century. 3 million white southerners moved North. 

  
  

  However, the Great Internal Migration was primarily the story of African Americans - 70% of migrants were black Americans, hoping to escape segregation, prejudice, and economic disadvantage. Many migrants settled in inner cities and worked in stockyards, slaughterhouses, railways, domestic service. They suffered widespread discrimination in housing and employment. 
• In the 1920s government spent $1,000,000,000 on motorways

  
  

   In 1930 95 million cinema tickets were sold every week  

  
  

  In 1927 63% of homes had electricity 
• Declaration of independence - Signed in 1776 by US revolutionaries; it declared the United States as a free state. 

  The ideology of the American Dream was coined by James Truslow Adams in his book, The Epic of America. 
• Jeffersonian Agriculturism - The theory that human identity and self-esteem is determined by a connection to land and its cycle of growth. 
•  “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” 
• Homestead Act (1892) - Encouraged westward settlement by allowing heads of families to buy 160 acres of land for a small fee ($10-30); settlers were required to develop and remain on the land for five years. Over 400,000 families got land through this law. 
• Conspicuous consumption - Term used by the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929) in The Theory of the Leisure Class: A Study of Economic Institutions (1899) to identify the tendency of the rich to display their wealth through extravagant purchase. 
• Plessy vs Ferguson case (1896) - Supreme Court ruling that upheld the 'separate but equal' doctrine which stated that separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional if they were equal, this was not the case 
• NAACP - Interracial organization founded in 1909 to abolish segregation and discrimination and to achieve political and civil rights for African Americans. 
• 13th Amendment – Abolished slavery throughout the U.S with no compensation for slave owners. 
• ‘One drop rule’ - This functioned to limit the legal rights and status of anyone considered to be Black on ancestral terms, but also helped codify blood quantum conceptions of race. This in turn set the terms for states to pass so-called Jim Crow laws as ways to get around the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment. 

   
• KKK – By 1925 the KKK had amassed 4 million members across the U.S.