APUSH Period 6: Ultimate Guide to Period 6 APUSH

[MUSIC] What's up, APUSH crew?

Today, we're gonna break down

Period 6 in the APUSH curriculum.

We're going from 1865 to 1898.

If you want to get real super smart

on these topics, click any one of these

four videos and you'll get all

the real nitty-gritty details.

Today, we're gonna try to go quick.

So, one important topic is

post-Civil War expansion.

In the post-Civil War era, there's a lot

of economic opportunities out in the West.

These include mining, farming,

and the cattle industry.

And the government had actually

established policies,

such as the Homestead Act.

If you went West,

you could get 160 acres of land.

It's not necessarily the best land,

but you can get this land

for relatively cheap.

The Pacific Railroad Act,

which established the route

for the transcontinental railroad.

So, the government is facilitating

the movement of people west.

In fact, the government is very active

in this process because it is going to be

the government, unfortunately,

removing the native people,

forcing them onto reservations,

more on that in a moment,

and giving land and grant subsidies

to the railroad companies

for this expansion to take place.

So, it's important you know the role of

the government in this Western expansion.

As the nation is expanding West,

there is a growing conservationist

movement in the country.

They're starting to realize that we need

to preserve some of our natural resources

and there's really a battle between

government agencies and conservationist

groups,

versus corporate interests who want

to make money off the water and the air

and other things, and who's really

gonna control these natural resources.

You do have the Department

of the Interior.

It was established in 1849.

And its job,

it was responsible for the management

and conservation of federal land

and other natural resources.

The U.S. Fish Commission

is established in 1871.

It's created to preserve the fisheries of

the U.S. so we don't overfish and run out.

And really, a huge person in the

conservationist movement is John Muir.

In 1892, he establishes the Sierra Club

and its whole purpose was to fight

for conservation and preservation

of natural resources.

And we're really gonna see in Period 7,

Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt is gonna be

the guy who's gonna make this

happen on a federal level.

Unfortunately, conservation is not gonna

be something the government's interested

in when it comes to Native Americans.

Their policy kind of can go into two

categories during this time period,

violent conflict or assimilation policies.

There's a whole bunch

of battles that take place.

Really, they're massacres,

the Sand Creek Massacre.

The Colorado Militia goes in, attacks,

and kills over 100 native people,

many of them women and children.

The Battle of Little Bighorn, 1876,

the Sioux Tribe,

inspired by the leadership

of Sitting Bull, kills Colonel Custer

and his men in the 7th Cavalry.

It's also known as Custer's Last Stand.

However,

and then government's gonna come in after

the Battle of Little Bighorn

and round up the Sioux resistance.

There's a Ghost Dance movement,

which begins amongst the Sioux Indians

in the Dakota Territory where they feel

like this is a kind of cultural revival.

They're gonna get rid of the white man,

the buffaloes are gonna return,

and all is gonna be well.

However, the U.S. government is going

to come in with the Battle

of Wounded Knee, which is the last major

Indian battle in 1890 where the U.S. Army

goes into the Dakotas and kills

over 200 native people.

Once again, this is more

of a massacre than it is a battle.

Assimilation policies,

tribes were oftentimes forced onto

reservations,

such as the Great Sioux Reserve

and this was supported by laws such

as the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.

Its whole purpose was to end

tribal ownership of land.

The government wants native

tribes to dissolve and they want

to force them onto private farms.

We also see various Native American

schools opening up with the support

of the federal government and their goal,

their duty was

to assimilate native people.

Kill the Indian, save the man

was the idea in these schools.

Another thing happening during this

post-Civil War era is industrialization.

You have large-scale production,

tremendous technological change,

all sorts of new inventions making life

easier, improved communication networks,

and you see business during this time

seeking to maximize the exploitation of a

growing labor force and natural resources.

Key to this though,

is industry leaders such as Carnegie,

of course, the steel guy,

and Rockefeller Oil,

who are seeking to dominate their

respective industries through

a variety of techniques.

You've got horizontal integration being

used where you control all

competition in a particular industry.

In other words, you're consolidating all

your competitors to monopolize a market.

Vertical integration,

you control all aspects of production,

of manufacturing, from extracting the raw

materials to selling the finished product.

And in order to eliminate or reduce

competition, business leaders sought to

establish monopolies, trusts, and pools.

They also believed and defended their

wealth with ideas such as social

Darwinism, meaning the rich are rich

because they're hardworking and the poor

are poor because they're lazy or inferior.

And this is this idea

of survival of the fittest.

In fact, one of the other key aspects

of this period is advocating

for laissez-faire policies.

In other words, the government

should not regulate business.

It's important you know about

the regional differences.

So, you have the West experiencing its own

economic growth and population growth.

The North and the Midwest is

industrializing,

but you also have the South.

And after reconstruction,

there was an attempt at industrializing

the Southern economy.

Some refer to it as the New South.

And there is a growth in the number

of textile industries in the South.

Remember, the South was largely

agriculture, so you have textile mills

and factories coming into Southern states.

However, the South remained,

even though you have this idea

of the New South, the South remained....

primarily agriculture.

In fact, tenant farming and sharecropping

continued to be the predominant

labor system of the Southern economy.

And it's really African American laborers

and poor whites, but really Black laborers

who are doing much of this work

in the tenant farming and sharecropping.

Now during this time,

during this Industrial Revolution,

there's a lot good happening,

industrialization and urbanization,

people moving to the cities largely

because they're looking for jobs.

They're bringing about

new economic opportunities

for immigrants and workers.

People are going from rural

areas to urban areas.

Immigrants are coming from other countries

looking for these new economic

opportunities,

and the workforce is expanding.

We also see this time period presenting

new career opportunities,

in spite of a lot of social prejudice

for African Americans and women

and other disadvantaged groups.

Now, a real key point in Period 6 is this.

While industrialization brought numerous

opportunities to workers and dramatically

expanded the work force,

low wages and dangerous working

conditions continued to be a problem.

So yes, there were jobs,

but life was very difficult for workers.

And as a result of this,

workers are going to fight back.

They're gonna fight back to try to change

this reality, and you're

gonna see workers organize.

You have the Knights of Labor you

should know about in 1869, founded.

Terence Powderly is one

of the key figures in this union.

They opened up the union to all workers,

skilled and unskilled workers.

This was unique.

Women and African Americans were

also allowed to join the union.

However, after the Haymarket Riot where

labor unions were kind of

attached to radical movements, they

are gonna suffer a decline in numbers.

The big one though is

the American Federation of Labor,

the AFL, founded in 1886.

Make sure you know about Samuel Gompers.

They're gonna focus on skilled workers

and they're not really

interested in social reforms.

They focus on bread-and-butter issues,

practical things like wages,

working condition, and hours.

And by 1900, it was the largest union

in the country.

Now workers, if you're going to evaluate

the labor movement during the Gilded Age,

during this industrial era, they are

gonna have some successes and failures.

Workers did form local and national unions

that did directly confront

growing corporate power.

And you're gonna get the beginning

of a national labor movement and the rise

of union leaders such as Eugene Debs.

You're gonna see him

at the Pullman Strike,

and Mother Jones in the Knights of Labor.

However, this is gonna be

followed by a lot of failures.

Homestead Strike in 1892,

workers at Carnegie Steel

are defeated during a strike.

Henry Frick is gonna call out the guards

and the union's gonna be busted.

Pullman Strike in 1894,

President Cleveland is gonna use the Army

and a court injunction

to defeat the strike.

Eugene Debs will be thrown in jail.

And a big problem for the unions was

also division amongst themselves.

You have division between skilled

and unskilled workers,

ethnic and racial groups.

Very often workers' unions were against

immigrants like the Chinese in the West,

so you are gonna

have problems organizing.

You're also gonna have

hostility from corporations.

They're gonna be hiring Pinkerton Guards,

yellow-dog contracts,

pledging you won't form a union.

And the government is gonna be

on the sidelines offering no protection

because of the laissez-faire

policies of the time period.

It's important you know that the lives

of farmers was also changing as they

had to adapt to mechanized agriculture.

They had to buy all this new equipment,

which made them more efficient

in producing crops, and a dependence

on powerful railroad companies.

Farmers are going to have a lot

of problems as they become more

efficient at growing crops.

As agriculture becomes more and more

mechanized, prices are gonna fall.

You're also gonna see unfair

railroad business practices.

Railroad companies will oftentimes charge

small farmers more than large farmers.

The high cost of machinery is

gonna cause huge amount of debt.

Tight money supply, not having access

to cheap money is going to be a concern.

And of course, high tariff policies

amongst many Republican administrations.

All of these things are gonna

cause farmers to also organize.

Couple of key farmers groups you should

know about, the Grange Movement is gonna

start off organizing social

and educational activities,

but later on they're gonna lobby the state

legislators in places such

as Illinois for reforms.

We're gonna see how

that works out in a moment.

The Farmer's Alliance will follow

in the 1870s, really in Texas.

They're gonna be split though because

in the South you're gonna have division.

African American farmers are gonna have

to form their own farmer's group called

the Colored Farmers Alliance,

and they're going to ignore the plight

and the problems of tenant farmers.

And the big one you should know about is

the one that actually forms into a

political party, the Populist Party.

They're going to be key.

Their strength is going to be amongst

farmers, but also amongst workers.

And their platform is pretty varied

in what they want,

and they're really calling for political

reform and a stronger role

of the government in the economy.

For instance, they want the government

to own the railroad companies.

Two, they want the free and unlimited

coinage of silver to increase the money

supply so that farmers

have access to cheap money.

Three, they wanna have an income tax,

which the rich would pay more.

Four, they wanna have political reform where

people would have the direct

election of senators.

This was not the case at this time.

And five, they also want reforms such as

the initiative and referendums so that you

could take away power from these powerful

business interests and these

political machines.

Which leads us to the government

and the role of the government.

Mark Twain famously called this era

the "Gilded Age," and what he meant was

below the surface things are

not as good as they seem.

There was rampant corruption

and problems in this time period.

Politics during the Gilded Age was tied

heavily to big business and remember

there's a laissez-faire philosophy

which prevented the government

from actively regulating the economy.

But it's important you understand

that you're going to see the start of

government regulation during this period.

During the Grange Movement, they got laws

passed, Granger Laws,

which protected farmers against

abuse of the railroad industry.

In the case, Munn versus Illinois,

the court ruled that states could

in fact regulate the railroads.

However, that's overturned in the Wabash

case in 1886, where the court rules

the states cannot regulate interstate

commerce, trade between different states.

And that's gonna eventually lead

to the passage

of the Interstate Commerce Act which is

going to regulate, the federal government

is going to regulate trade

between different states.

In the beginning it's going to be

ineffective, but it's going

to be an important precedent.

The other big one you should know

about is the Sherman Antitrust Act.

This is going to outlaw trust and other

monopolies that fixed

prices and restrained trade.

And unfortunately for labor unions,

it's going to be used against them in the

beginning, not against the monopolies.

That will change, however,

with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt

during the Progressive Movement

in Period 7.

Another important thing that's happening

during this time period is the movement

of people, and we're talking about

large-scale internal,

within the United States,

and external migration is taking place.

We already saw the internal

settlers seeking opportunities

on the frontier out in the West.

You know, and remember these opportunities

are available as a result

of the Homestead Act and the completion

of the Transcontinental Railroad,

they are going west.

You're gonna see the mass movement

of people to urban areas as they're

looking for jobs and hoping

to get economic opportunities.

African-Americans are gonna really

begin to move out of the South slowly

at first around the 1890s,

but it's gonna increase especially during

World War I and World War II,

leaving Jim Crow laws, segregation,

and heading to Northern cities.

This will eventually be

called the Great Migration.

And you're gonna have external

migration of people taking place.

Large-scale immigration

from China during this period.

This will slow down dramatically with

the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Make sure you know about that.

And after 1880, you're gonna have

a different kind of immigrant coming

in from Europe,

the so-called new immigrants from Southern

and Eastern Europe,

and we're talking places like Russia,

Italy, Poland, where my peeps

are from, and others.

They are largely gonna settle in urban

areas looking for job opportunities

that are presented as a result

of the Industrial Revolution.

There is going to be a response to this

changing immigration and that is

going to be the rise of nativism.

In fact, during this time period, there's

gonna be various attempts

to exclude and keep out immigrants.

We've already heard about

the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively

shutting out Chinese immigration

to the United States.

The American Protective Association was

an anti-Catholic group

made up of American Protestants

that wanted to get restrictions and limits

on the number of Catholics coming in.

And you have various proposals

for literacy tests which was proposed

to keep Southern and Eastern immigrants

out of the U.S. And the idea here is

that these immigrants are undesirable,

they're gonna undermine

and ruin the American way.

There are gonna be various challenges

of urbanization and immigration.

Cities were often divided among classes

between the rich and the poor,

races, ethnicities, ethnic groups.

For example, the Italians in Little Italy,

the Chinese in San Francisco are going to

form their own communities and cultures.

Low wages and dangerous working conditions

kept many workers in extreme poverty.

Since you have so many workers confined

in these cities, unskilled

work leads to low wages.

There's gonna be a contrast during this

time between the poor and the wealthy,

and the wealthy are enjoying

lives of conspicuous consumption.

They're able to spend huge amounts

of money to show off publicly

their economic power and status.

That's not the reality for the majority

of people living in the cities.

In fact, many people in cities like

New York are gonna be

living in tenement housing.

It was extremely common and Jacob Riis is

gonna document this in his famous piece,

"How the Other Half Lives" in 1890,

giving a reality check to many Americans.

Child labor is becoming increasingly

common during this time and immigrants

attempted to both assimilate, for example,

learn English,

adopt to mainstream American culture,

while also maintaining their

own unique cultural identities.

And political machines dominated city life

by exchanging welfare services,

food and other things,

and jobs for political support.

And this creates all sorts

of corruption and fraud and waste.

However, these challenges are gonna begin

to be addressed during the Gilded Age.

You have the Gospel of Wealth,

which was a belief that the wealthy had

a moral obligation to help

out those less fortunate.

Andrew Carnegie talked about

this in his piece "Wealth."

Settlement House Movement sought

to relieve urban poverty and provide

assistance to immigrants.

And you see this

with Jane Addams' Hull-House in Chicago

helping immigrants transition

to life in America.

The Social Gospel Movement challenged

the dominant corporate ethic of the time

and this was a group of Christians

which said Christians had a responsibility

to deal with urban poverty

and to help alleviate it.

The Socialist Party and other

organizations actually challenged

capitalism itself,

called it exploitive and critiqued it.

You had Edward Bellamy

and his "Looking Backward."

A utopian socialist society is depicted

in this novel

and in this society they have fixed

the social and economic

injustices of the time.

In fact, the Socialist Party is going

to run candidates for political offices

at both the state and national level.

And eventually, and this is in Period

7, the effort to reform these problems

will eventually lead to a movement known

as the Progressive Movement in the 1890s

and we got some videos on that as well.

Check them out.

Finally, not only are there going to be

people addressing the economic problems

of the Gilded Age, you're gonna have

people addressing the social ones as well.

The National American Woman Suffrage

Association, NAWSA,

sought to secure the right to vote

for women, the right of suffrage.

You have people like

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

and Carrie Chapman Catt working tirelessly

throughout this time period

trying to get the right to vote.

Various African-American leaders sought

to advance the cause of civil rights.

Important one for Period 6 is Booker T.

Washington and he advocated

African-Americans should acquire

vocational skills, job skills to gain

self-respect and economic security.

He established the Tuskegee Institute

to try to accomplish this goal.

And Ida Wells Barnett was very active

in not only the Women's Rights Movement,

but also in the campaign against lynching.

That's a real quick rundown review.

This is not meant to teach you everything

in APUSH Period 6, but it's a reminder.

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Peace!