Farmers and industrial workers response to the gilded age

For more information Protests due to the global financial crisis, In the aftermath of the global financial crisis a Western crisis that became globalWestern nations have suffered greatly. Resulting attempts to address the economic problems include austerity measures that feel much like the disastrous Structural Adjustment Policies that these Western nations imposed or strongly pressed developing nations to pursue in the s and 80s, with devastating consequences.

A Tale of Today For them, "Gilded Age" was a pejorative term used to describe a time of materialistic excesses combined with extreme poverty. With respect to eras of American history, historical views vary as to when the Gilded Age began, ranging from starting right after the American Civil War ended,oror as the Reconstruction Era ended in The nation was rapidly expanding its economy into new areas, especially heavy industry like factories, railroadsand coal mining.

Inthe First Transcontinental Railroad opened up the far-west mining and ranching regions. Travel from New York to San Francisco now took six days instead of six months.

The new track linked formerly isolated areas with larger markets and allowed for the rise of commercial farming, ranching, and mining, creating a truly national marketplace.

American steel production rose to surpass the combined totals of Britain, Germany, and France. Bythe process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a few large corporations, called " trusts ", dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meat, and farm machinery.

Through vertical integration these trusts were able to control each aspect of the production of a specific good, ensuring that the profits made on the finished product were maximized and prices minimized, and by controlling access to the raw materials, prevented other companies from being able to compete in the marketplace.

Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that worker efficiency in steel could be improved through the use of very close observations with a stop watch to eliminate wasted effort. Mechanization made some factories an assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the direction of skilled foremen and engineers.

Machine shops grew rapidly, and they comprised highly skilled workers and engineers. Both the number of unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew. Railroads invented modern management, with clear chains of command, statistical reporting, and complex bureaucratic systems.

They hired young men ages 18—21 and promoted them internally until a man reached the status of locomotive engineer, conductor, or station agent at age 40 or so.

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Career tracks were invented for skilled blue-collar jobs and for white-collar managers, starting in railroads and expanding into finance, manufacturing, and trade.

Together with rapid growth of small business, a new middle class was rapidly growing, especially in northern cities. From to, patents were issued for new inventions—over ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years.

George Westinghouse invented air brakes for trains making them both safer and faster. Electric power delivery spread rapidly across Gilded Age cities. The streets were lighted at night, and electric streetcars allowed for faster commuting to work and easier shopping.

The United States dominated the global industry into the s. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting homes. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company and monopolized the oil industry, which mostly produced kerosene before the automobile created a demand for gasoline in the 20th century.

The generation between and was already mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself. Shipping freight and passengers[ edit ] First they provided a highly efficient network for shipping freight and passengers across a large national market.

The result was a transforming impact on most sectors of the economy including manufacturing, retail and wholesale, agriculture, and finance.

The United States now had an integrated national market practically the size of Europe, with no internal barriers or tariffs, all supported by a common language, and financial system and a common legal system. Construction of railroads was far more expensive than factories.

New York by was the dominant financial market.

In —, they liquidated their American assets to pay for war supplies. Civil engineers became the senior management of railroads. The leading innovators were the Western Railroad of Massachusetts and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the s, the Erie in the s and the Pennsylvania in the s.

Railroading became a lifetime career for young men; women were almost never hired. A typical career path would see a young man hired at age 18 as a shop laborer, be promoted to skilled mechanic at age 24, brakemen at 25, freight conductor at 27, and passenger conductor at age White-collar careers paths likewise were delineated.Analyze the ways in which farmers and industrial workers responded to industrialization in the gilded age – During the time periods .

The Gilded Age in United States history is the late 19th Australian historian Peter Shergold found that the standard of living for industrial workers was higher than in Europe.

He compared wages and the standard of living in Pittsburgh with Birmingham, England, one of the richest industrial cities of Europe. The fearful stayed home. The History of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the s, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples.

After a failed English attempt to colonize Virginia in the s by Walter Raleigh [citation needed], permanent English colonization began in Virginia with Jamestown, Virginia, in Editor’s note: We are pleased to again welcome Philip Leigh, who brings us a long-form guest post on how the Reconstruction shaped the southern states.

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Farmers found the major political parties of the Gilded Age unresponsive to their demands that government deal with their problems. Farmers no longer controlled the social, economic, or political systems and this was a bitter pill to swallow.