Unit 6 Review: Who Held Power in the Gilded Age, 1865–1898?

PART II — U.S. HISTORY, 1491 TO THE PRESENT · UNIT 6 REVIEW

Who Held Power in the Gilded Age, 1865–1898?

What Industrial Growth Changed After 1865

The post-Civil-War United States built a national industrial economy through railroads, corporate capital, technological change, western extraction, and large-scale migration. That growth created new wealth, middle-class occupations, and consumer possibilities while also producing dangerous labor conditions, concentrated corporate power, urban overcrowding, racial exclusion, and recurring political demands for regulation. The federal government was never simply absent. It subsidized railroads and settlement, fought Native nations, enforced or abandoned civil rights, regulated interstate commerce, excluded Chinese immigrants, intervened in strikes, and debated money and tariffs. The argument over government’s role was already underway before Progressivism.

The Sequence From the Railroad Strike to Plessy

KEY DATES

Use These Facts to Explain Power in the Gilded Age

Railroad land grants: federal policy helped create private corporate growth.

Dawes Act: assimilation and land loss replaced treaty-based recognition as a dominant Native policy.

Knights of Labor versus AFL: workers disagreed over the scope and purpose of unionism.

Chinese Exclusion: immigration control became decisively federal and racialized.

Middle-class white-collar work: industrialization changed social structure, not only factory production.

Sharecropping and Jim Crow: the New South mixed limited industrial change with deep economic and racial continuity.

Omaha Platform: agrarian protest demanded monetary, regulatory, and democratic reform.

ICC and Sherman Act: federal regulation began before the Progressive Era but initially remained weak.

Practice: Industrial America Under Pressure

LEQ: How Westward Expansion Changed American Society, 1865–1898

Prompt: Evaluate the extent to which westward expansion influenced United States society from 1865 to 1898.

MODEL THESIS

Westward expansion transformed U.S. society to a large extent by integrating western resources into national markets, accelerating migration and federal land distribution, and intensifying the destruction of Native sovereignty. The expansion also strengthened national corporate power through railroads and resource extraction, even though older ideas of independent family settlement remained important.

ARGUMENT CATEGORY 1

National markets and corporations: transcontinental railroad completion in 1869; cattle and mining shipments; railroad land grants; national investment capital.

ARGUMENT CATEGORY 2

Federal land and settlement policy: homesteading after 1865, railroad land sales, mining booms, ranching, settlement growth. The Homestead Act itself is 1862, so if the prompt begins in 1865, treat the law as context and use post-1865 settlement as direct evidence.

ARGUMENT CATEGORY 3

Native sovereignty and society: Fort Laramie treaty conflicts, Black Hills, Little Bighorn, reservation confinement, Dawes Act, boarding schools, Wounded Knee.

OUT-OF-WINDOW WARNING

Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and the Mexican-American War are useful background for a longer tradition of expansion, but they do not count as direct 1865–1898 evidence.

POINT-EFFICIENT OPENING

Federal policy and private capital pushed post-Civil-War expansion together. Railroads tied western land and resources to national markets, while federal settlement and Native policy changed who controlled the land itself. Those changes affected economic organization, migration, and Native sovereignty at the same time.

PART II — CROSS-UNIT WRITING BRIDGES

LEQ: How Reformers Responded to Industrialization, 1820–1900

Prompt: Evaluate the extent to which reform movements responded to the effects of industrialization from 1820 to 1900.

MODEL THESIS

Reform movements responded substantially to industrialization by challenging new labor conditions, urban poverty, corporate power, and social disruption. Antebellum reform initially relied heavily on voluntary moral action, while late nineteenth-century labor, agrarian, settlement-house, and regulatory movements increasingly demanded collective organization or government intervention. The reform tradition therefore persisted, but its targets and preferred tools changed as industrialization deepened.

EVIDENCE LADDER

Antebellum: Lowell labor protests; temperance and common-school reform as responses to social disruption; abolition belongs only if you explicitly connect it to the market and slavery economy.

Gilded Age labor: Knights of Labor, AFL, Great Railroad Strike, Homestead, Pullman.

Agrarian: Grange, Farmers’ Alliances, Populist Omaha Platform.

Urban and social: settlement houses, Riis, Social Gospel, municipal reform.

Federal and state regulation: ICC, Sherman Antitrust, early workplace regulation.

WHERE THIS ARGUMENT GOES WRONG

Do not list reforms that happen inside the period without explaining what industrial problem each one answered.

DBQ Planning: How Economic Change Reshaped American Society, 1865–1910

Prompt: How did economic changes influence American society from 1865 to 1910?

BUILD FOUR ARGUMENT BUCKETS BEFORE READING DOCUMENTS

Work and class: corporate factories, wage labor, unions, strikes, middle-class white-collar work.

Migration and cities: immigration, ethnic neighborhoods, machines, tenements.

Race and region: sharecropping, New South industry, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow, western Native dispossession.

Government and reform: railroad regulation, antitrust, civil-service reform, settlement work, early Progressivism.

MODEL CLAIM

Economic change reshaped U.S. society extensively by creating new forms of wage labor, urban migration, corporate wealth, and regional specialization. Those changes also produced political and social responses, including unionism, immigration restriction, racial exclusion, agrarian protest, and growing demands for government regulation.

DOCUMENT RULE

Do not let one economic document remain only economic. Ask which social relationship changed because of it: work, class, race, migration, family life, urban politics, or government power.