1) Homestead Act stimulates rapid settlement of the West and the Southwest; frontier declared “closed” in 1890.

2) New territories and states press Congress for harsh policies to remove or isolate Indians.

3) Escalation of Army campaigns against Native Americans; over 200 battles in the decade after 1865.

4) Destruction of vast buffalo herds devastates Indian culture and economy.

5) Board of Indian Commissioners forces Native Americans onto poor lands and reservations; treaties persistently violated and promises broken.

6) Dawes Act undermines tribal autonomy by dividing reservation land by family units. 7) Nez Perce, Apaches and Sioux defeated between 1877 and 1890.

8) Fewer than ¼ million Indians remain in the United States by 1890.

2. A New American Society and Economy:

1) Civil War stimulates the growth of a national economy and government support for industrial development.

2) Local, state and federal subsidies facilitate the growth of railroads; transcontinental connection completed in 1869.

3) The first technological revolution: trans-Atlantic cable, telephone, Marconi’s wireless, steel skyscrapers and elevators, typewriter, motion pictures, phonograph, automobile, airplane; surge in patents – more than 10 times all previous U.S. history.

4) Modern corporations: limited liability, vertical and horizontal integration, holding companies, mergers, monopolies, investment banking and stock market spur unprecedented concentrations of private wealth.

5) The new business culture: Social Darwinism, the Gospel of Wealth, the Robber Barons and Horatio Alger’s “rags to riches”.

6) Critical realism in American literature: Twain, Howells, Dresser.

2: The New Urban Economy

1) Immigrant labor key to industrial growth – critical role of Irish and Chinese in building the railroads.

2) Child labor persists in new factories, among poor urban-immigrant families, in mines and agriculture.

3) Single white women enter workforce in department stores, offices, nursing and teaching; 20% of women working by 1900; black women largely confined to domestic service or teaching in segregated schools.

4) Ethnic and racial divisions (and the use of court injunctions and force to break strikes) limit the impact of early labor unions.

5) The “new” immigration from southern and eastern Europe; emergence of urban-ethnic neighborhoods, occupations, political machines and bosses.

6) Growth of great cities – millions of rural Americans and 25 million immigrants jam the new cities by 1910; beginnings of exodus of southern blacks to northern cities.

7) The modern urban lifestyle; electricity revolutionizes work and daily life: night shifts, night life, etc.

8) The new Nativism: fear of “hyphenated-Americans” and calls for immigration restriction; Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882.

9) Urban squalor; women and urban reforms: the settlement house movement, temperance, social work, etc.