Write the following two essays, plus the identification group below the essay choices. Each essay is worth 40 points and the identification group 20 points for a total of 100 points.
Industrialization transformed American life in the late 19th century as nothing had before. What was the overall character of this industrial change? Focusing on the careers and companies of such people as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, discuss how big business emerged and altered the old republic of small businesses and small farmers. To what degree was this a revolution and the creation of a new economic order in the United States? What was life like in the age of the new industrial city? How did workers and government respond to the new industrial order? To what degree were these responses successful? How did the new industrial shape and reshape the lives of women and immigrants.
We tend to think of American industrialization as a phenomenon located in the northeastern quadrant of the United States, today’s “rust belt” running west from New York to Chicago, but the fact is that mining, not farming and ranching dominated the economy of many western states, contrary to the myth of the six-gun West popularized by dime novels and western films. Colorado was one. And Mabel Barbee Lee wrote a memoir of growing up in one, Cripple Creek, which she memorialized in Cripple Creek Days. Write a review of Mabel Barbee Lee’s title Cripple Creek Days, a book about life in one of the world’s most famous and important mining towns of the late 19th and early 20th century. Discuss life in an industrial city in the West. To what degree did life in mining towns like this resemble life in industrial cities in the East, the main topic of Chapter 18 in The American Yawp? In your final, critical analysis, how would you assess the use of memoirs like this one in the writing of history? Memoirs such as this are important sources of information for historians writing about an era. In your discussion and analysis of this title, be sure to assess what historians might learn (or not learn) about the era and the region from using this book as a source.
Identify and give the significance of five of the following ten item:
Samuel Gompers &the American Federation of Labor
Taylorism
The Knights of Labor
“Jim Crow”
William Jennings Bryan
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
William Graham Sumner/Social Darwinism
The Alliance Movement
John D. Roekefeller
