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32 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Cornelius Vanderbilt
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an American entrepreneur.
He built his wealth in shipping and railroads and was the patriarch of the Vanderbilt family and one of the richest Americans in history. |
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New York Central Railroad
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a railroad operating in the Northeastern United States.
The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St.Louis in the midwest along with the intermediate cities of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit. |
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Federal land Grants 1865-1900
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covers Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era, and includes the rise of industrialization and the resulting surge of immigration in the United States. This period of rapid economic growth and soaring prosperity in North and West (but not the South) saw the U.S. become the world's dominant economic, industrial and agricultural power, although it exercised less international influence than Britain.
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Transcontinental Railroad
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a contiguous network of railroad trackage that crosses a continental land mass with terminals at different oceans or continental borders. Such networks can be via the tracks of either a single railroad, or over those owned or controlled by multiple railway companies along a continuous route.
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Jay Gould
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a leading American railroad developer and speculator.
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Panic of 1893
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a serious economic depression in the United States that began in that year.
marked by the collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures. |
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J.P. Morgan
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an American financier, banker and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time.
arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company he merged in 1901 the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses, including Consolidates Steel and Wire Company to form the United States Steel Corporation. |
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Bessemer Process
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first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron
The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten. |
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Andrew Carnegie
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Devoted to iron business he was inspired to fallow the creation of steel by Henry Bessemer.
He later created the Carnegie Steel Company. |
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Vertical Integration
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Vertically integrated companies in a supply chain are united through a common owner. Usually each member of the supply chain produces a different product or (market-specific) service, and the products combine to satisfy a common need. It is contrasted with horizontal integration.
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U.S. Steel
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an integrated steel producer with major production operations in the United States, Canada, and Central Europe.
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John D. Rockefeller
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he founded the Standard Oil Company and aggressively ran it until he officially retired in 1897.
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Horizontal Integration
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occurs when a firm is being taken over by, or merged with, another firm which is in the same industry and in the same stage of production as the merged firm,This process is also known as a "buy out" or "take-over".
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Anti Trust Movement
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the body of laws that prohibits anti-competitive behavior (monopoly) and unfair business practices. Antitrust laws are intended to encourage competition in the marketplace.
These competition laws make illegal certain practices deemed to hurt businesses or consumers or both, or generally to violate standards of ethical behavior. Government agencies known as competition regulators, along with private litigants, apply the antitrust and consumer protection laws in hopes of preventing market failure. |
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Sherman Antitrust Act 1890
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requires the United States federal government to investigate and pursue trusts, companies, and organizations suspected of violating the Act. It was the first Federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies
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United States v. E.C. Knight
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a United States Supreme Court case that limited the government's power to control monopolies.
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Laissez – Faire Capitalism
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an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies.
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Adam Smith
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a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economics. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. It earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works on economics ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism.
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Gospel of Wealth
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essay written by Andrew Carnegie in 1889 that described the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich. The central thesis of Carnegie's essay was the peril of allowing large sums of money to be passed into the hands of persons or organizations ill-equipped mentally or emotionally to cope with them. As a result, the wealthy entrepreneur must assume the responsibility of distributing his fortune in a way that it will be put to good use, and not wasted on frivolous expenditure. In this he represented a captain of industry who had risen to power by his own hand and refused to worship wealth.
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Transatlantic Cable
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he first cable used for telegraph communications laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Alexander Graham Bell
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an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.
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Sear Roebuck
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an American chain of department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in the late 19th century.
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Horatio Alger
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was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty
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Railroad Strike of 1877
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On July 16, railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, walked off the job to protest a 10 percent wage cut leveled by their employer, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Strikes to protest cutbacks in the midst of a period of nationwide economic depression soon spread westward across the country.
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National Labor union
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The National Labor Union followed the unsuccessful efforts of labor activists to form a national coalition of local trade unions. The National Labor Union sought instead to bring together all of the national labor organizations in existence, as well as the "eight-hour leagues" established to press for the eight-hour day, to create a national federation that could press for labor reforms and help found national unions in those areas where none existed.
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Knights of Labor
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The Knights promoted the social and cultural uplift of the workingman, rejected Socialism and radicalism, demanded the eight-hour day, and promoted the producers ethic of republicanism. In some cases it acted as a labor union, negotiating with employers, but it was never well organized, and after a rapid expansion in the mid-1880s, it suddenly lost its new members and became a small operation again.
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Terence V. Powderly
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was a highly visible national spokesman for the working man as head of the Knights of Labor from 1879 until 1893
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Haymarket Bombing
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It began as a rally in support of striking workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they dispersed the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of eight police officers, mostly from friendly fire, and an unknown number of civilians. In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were tried for murder. Four men were convicted and executed, and one committed suicide in prison, although the prosecution conceded none of the defendants had thrown the bomb.
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American Federation of Labor
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the first federations of labor unions in the United States.
In practice, AFL unions were important in industrial cities, where they formed a central labor office to coordinate the actions of different AFL unions. |
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Samuel Gompers
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Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and served as that organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted "thorough" organization and collective bargaining to secure shorter hours and higher wages, the first essential steps, he believed, to emancipating labor. He also encouraged the AFL to take political action to "elect their friends" and "defeat their enemies."
During World War I, Gompers and the AFL worked with the government to avoid strikes and boost morale, while raising wage rates and expanding membership. |
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Homestead Strike 1894
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The Homestead Strike was when, in 1892, Andrew Carnegie reduced wages at his steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania and the union workers refused to accept the cut. The company locked out the union workers and hired nonunion labor and 300 armed guards. The locked out workers gathered weapons and , on July 6, a battle broke out killing ten people. After that, the state militia began to escort the nonunion workers to the mills and after four months, the strike collapsed, breaking the union.
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Eugene V. Debs
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an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.
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