6.1 Contextualizing Period 6

The name comes from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Something gilded is covered in a thin layer of gold over cheaper metal. The label fits: the era had dazzling fortunes, mansions and inventions on the surface, and poverty, corruption and dangerous work underneath.

Historians use the label loosely. You can treat it as roughly 1870 to 1900, overlapping Period 6 (1865–1898).

• Industry: railroads, steel, oil and electricity made the U.S. the world's biggest industrial economy by about 1900. Giant corporations and trusts controlled whole industries.
• Work: most workers now earned wages from someone else, often in factories, mines or rail yards. Unions and strikes grew, and so did violent clashes with employers and government.
• The West: railroads, miners, ranchers and homesteaders moved onto the Plains and into the Far West. The U.S. government broke treaties, fought wars against American Indian nations and forced them onto reservations.
• Cities and immigrants: millions of 'new immigrants' from Southern and Eastern Europe, and others from China and Mexico, joined rural Americans in fast-growing cities.
• Politics and ideas: Americans argued over laissez-faire (government staying out of the economy) versus regulation, over gold versus silver money, and over who counted as a full American.

Several Period 5 developments set up this unit. The Civil War built up Northern industry and finance. Wartime laws passed by a Republican Congress, including the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Land-Grant College Act (all 1862), pushed settlement and railroads west. Reconstruction ended in 1877, and white Democrats called Redeemers retook Southern state governments. That opened the door to segregation and the loss of Black voting rights.

The market revolution of Period 4 had already started factories and wage work in the Northeast. In Period 6 that change spread across the whole country and grew far larger.

Period 7 begins around 1890, so the two periods overlap. The problems of the Gilded Age (monopolies, unsafe work, corrupt city machines, farm debt) became the targets of Progressive reformers after 1900. The search for overseas markets in the 1880s and 1890s led to the Spanish–American War and an American empire in 1898. Many Populist demands, such as a graduated income tax and the direct election of senators, became law in the Progressive Era.

Contextualization means placing a source or argument inside the larger situation of its time. For a DBQ or LEQ point, you need a few sentences that describe broader developments before, during or right after the period of the prompt, and you need to connect them to the topic. A single passing phrase like 'during the Gilded Age' is not enough.

For Period 6, strong context usually mentions rapid industrialization, the rise of big business, a weak or hands-off federal government, and the end of Reconstruction.