The years between 1865 and 1920 witnessed the beginning of a modern America poised to take its place upon the world stage. Great fortunes arose amidst tremendous poverty, and what many experienced as the liberation of a new industrial economy looked to others to be a constriction of deeply-held beliefs about the labor, independence, and freedom in a nation built upon agrarian and craft ideals. Trace the increasing organization of institutions in these years, paying attention to such potential examples as the federal government’s experiments during Reconstruction, the business innovations of the Gilded Age, the farmers’ revolt in Populism, Progressivism’s new vision of governance, and the struggle over constitutional rights in the period of Jim Crow and women’s suffrage. What solutions did reformers suggest to ameliorate the changes wrought by industrialization, and how successful were they in implementing their reforms?
Potential IDs to use in the essay.
John Rockefeller Fourteen Points
Freedmen’s Bureau Andrew Johnson
14th Amendment Booker T. Washington
American Federation of Labor Eugene Debs
The Jungle
The Souls of Black Folk New Nationalism
Lusitania Emilio Aguinaldo
Elizabeth Johnson Williams Lucy Burns
Omaha Platform Chinese Exclusion Act
William Jennings Bryan Harlan’s Dissent
Farmers’ Alliance
Ida B. Wells separate spheres
19th Amendment Minor v. Happersett
Progressivism William Howard Taft
Quanah Parker
sharecropping
double consciousness Radical Reconstruction
U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark William McKinley
15th Amendment Spanish-American War
