1. Mark Twain and Jane Addams Critics in the Industrial Age.

2. The Opening of the West  The destruction of Native American culture.  “Reconcentration”, destruction, and the Dawes Severality Act.  Mining and the West.  Small vs. corporate mining: The Mining Law of 1872  The land boom.  Railroads: the transcontinentals.  Cattle culture.

3. Industrial Trends in Post-Civil War America  Growth and the pace of change.  Manufactured goods produced: rises from $1.8 billion in 1859 to $13 billion in 1899.  Gross Domestic Product up 44% between 1874 and 1883.  Industry as a driving economic force.  The shift away from agriculture.  New industrial products penetrate the American consumer market.  Increased productivity from new technology.

4. Industrial Organization  The new realities of the business environment.  Economies of scale and the wave effect.  Concentration of capital for production.  Management and coordination: vertical and horizontal integration.  Answers to the challenges of business.  Corporations in the industrial age.  Trusts and holding companies.  Monopoly  The railroads as the first modern monopolies.  The new trusts: U.S. Steel and Standard Oil.  The popular reaction to the trusts: the rise of unionism.

5. Industrial Age Politics  Local politics.  The city machines: corruption and “fixing”.  Class and urban growth in machine politics.  The national scene.  Personality politics, money, and vote fraud.  Patronage, Garfield’s assassination, and the Pendleton Act of 1883.  Populism and it’s effects.  The Granger movement and the Populists.  The silver question: the “Crime of ’73”, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the collapse of Baring Bros.  The election of 1896.  Silverites and Goldbugs: the Democratic split.  Bryan vs. McKinley: the new politics.

6. Mark Twain and Imperialism.  Twain’s life.  Twain’s early life and his formative years.  Twain as middle class critic.  Twain and anti-imperialism.  The Spanish-American War  Early imperialism in the Americas.  The “splendid little war.”  Philippine insurrection and the true face of imperialism.  The Anti-Imperialism League.  The aftermath of imperial expansion: new territory and new policies.

7. The New Urban America  Urban growth.  Class and the patterns of growth: ghettoes, suburbs, transport and the “Rule of 45”.  Service problems and their solutions.  Segregation of space and city planning.  The new urban Americans.  Economic class and industrial society.  Laissez-faire vs. socialism: “Horatio Alger” and the popular imagination.  The new immigration: the padrone system, Social Darwinism and the Exclusion Act of 1882.

9. Jane Addams  Addams as a reformer.  Marxism and the early reformers.  Hull House and direct aid to the poor.  Labor unrest and the underclass.  The Homestead Steel Strike.  Henry Clay Frick and private security forces.  The breaking of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.  The Pullman Strike.  Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union.  “Interfering with the mails” and the use of Federal troops as strikebreakers.  The western mine strikes.