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FrançaisAP US History Unit 6: Period 6, 1865–1898
In one generation, the United States stopped being a republic of farms and became the largest industrial economy on the planet. Steel poured out of Pittsburgh, oil out of Cleveland, and railroad track unspooled across the Plains. Twenty million immigrants arrived from southern Italy, the Russian Pale, and the villages of Guangdong. New cities grew tenement by tenement while a New South tied freed Black families to the cotton crop and a federal army confined Plains nations to reservations. The Gilded Age built modern America and produced the inequalities that the next century would spend trying to repair.
The 14 lessons in order
Contextualizing Period 6
The opening lesson. Frames the years from 1865 to 1898 as one connected industrial era and previews the westward, southern, urban, immigrant, and labor forces that drive the next thirteen lessons.
Westward Expansion: Economic Development
The transcontinental railroads, the Homestead Act, mining booms, the long cattle drive, and the federal subsidies that turned the trans-Mississippi West into a commercial geography wired to eastern markets.
Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development
The Plains Wars, the destruction of the bison, the reservation system, and the Dawes Act. The federal campaign to break Indigenous sovereignty and the cultural persistence that survived it.
The New South
Henry Grady's promotional vision, the limited industrial development that followed, and the sharecropping system that kept most Black and poor white Southerners tied to the cotton economy. Plessy v. Ferguson and the legal foundation of Jim Crow.
Technological Innovation
The Bessemer process, the telephone, the incandescent light bulb, the typewriter, and the elevator. How a torrent of patents and engineering breakthroughs reshaped what factories could produce and what city life could look like.
The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
Carnegie steel, Rockefeller oil, J. P. Morgan finance. The vertical and horizontal trusts, the holding company, and the late-century turn toward Pacific and Latin American markets that previewed the imperial era.
Labor in the Gilded Age
The Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and the great strikes that ran from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman. Child labor, the eight-hour day, and the legal weapons used against organized workers.
Immigration and Migration in the Gilded Age
The new wave: Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Greeks, and Slovaks from southern and eastern Europe; Chinese laborers on the Pacific Coast; African American migrants who began the long journey out of the South. Ellis Island, Angel Island, and the ethnic neighborhoods they produced.
Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age
Nativism, the American Protective Association, and the long argument over what counted as American. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the slow construction of the federal immigration apparatus.
Development of the Middle Class
The clerks, managers, salespeople, telephone operators, nurses, and teachers who staffed the new corporate economy. Department stores, mail-order catalogs, streetcar suburbs, mass-circulation magazines, and the founding of the women's colleges, HBCUs, and research universities that anchored the Gilded Age middle class.
Reform in the Gilded Age
The Granger movement, the Farmers' Alliances, and the Populist Party of 1892. Munn v. Illinois, Wabash v. Illinois, and the Interstate Commerce Act. Civil-service reform under the Pendleton Act, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the settlement-house overlap with Lesson 9.
Controversies over the Role of Government in the Gilded Age
Laissez-faire orthodoxy, Social Darwinism, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The early federal experiments with regulating big business and the courts that gutted them.
Politics in the Gilded Age
The closely balanced two-party system, machine politics, civil-service reform, the Granger movement, and the Populist insurgency that climaxed in William Jennings Bryan's 1896 campaign.
Continuity and Change in Period 6
The closing lesson. Synthesis essay, full-period DBQ practice, and a graphic comparison of the agrarian republic of 1865 with the industrial empire that stood at the threshold of the Spanish-American War.