TIMELINE

WORK,EXCHANGE, AND TECHNOLOGYPEOPLINGENVIRONMENT AND GEOGRAPHYPOLITICS AND POWERIDEAS, BELIEFS, AND CULTURE
1870
  • Economic depression (1873–1879)

  • First department store opens in Philadelphia (1874)

  • Great Railroad Strike (1877)

  • Deskilling of labor under mass production

  • Hostility toward Chinese immigrants grows

  • Successful containment of New York cholera outbreak spurs movement for public health (1866)

  • First national park established at Yellowstone (1872)

  • Appalachian Mountain Club founded (1876)

  • Democrats make sweeping congressional gains (1874)

  • Era of close party competition in national elections (1874–1894)

  • Reconstruction ends (1877)

  • Comstock Act bans circulation of most information about sex and birth control (1873)

  • National League launches professional baseball (1876)

  • Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)

1880
  • First vertically integrated corporations

  • Rockefeller establishes Standard Oil Trust

  • Emergence of white-collar managerial work

  • Women enter paid labor as office workers

  • Knights of Labor grows rapidly (mid-1880s)

  • American Federation of Labor founded (1886)

  • Rapid industrialization draws immigrants from around the world; American cities grow rapidly

  • Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943)

  • Drought on the plains prompts calls for federal irrigation

  • Hatch Act (1887) provides federal support for agricultural research and experiment stations

  • Industrialization and urban growth cause rising pollution

  • Pendleton Civil Service Act (1883)

  • Peak influence of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1880s)

  • Interstate Commerce Act (1887)

  • Hull House settlement founded (1889)

  • Increasing numbers of students attend college

  • Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute (1881)

  • William Dean Howells calls for realism in literature (1881)

  • Birth of American football

  • Popularity of vaudeville (1880s–1890s)

1890
  • Severe economic depression (1893–1897)

  • Accelerated corporate mergers in key industries

  • Birth of modern advertising

  • Gorras Blancas confront wealthy Anglo interests in New Mexico

  • Ellis Island opens (1892)

  • Supreme Court upholds segregation of schools and public facilities in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

  • Unemployed whites attack and drive Chinese farmworkers out of California

  • Sierra Club founded (1892)

  • “Bicycle craze” and rise of hiking and camping get more Americans outdoors

  • Rise of People’s Party (1890–1896)

  • Sweeping Republican gains (1894)

  • “Solid South” emerges; African American disenfranchisement in South (1890–1905)

  • William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan (1896)

  • National Consumers’ League founded (1899)

  • Chicago World’s Fair (1893)

  • Literary realism and naturalism gain recognition

  • Popularity of ragtime music (1890s–1900s)

  • Armory Show introduces modern art (1913)

  • Rise of Social Gospel

  • Joseph Pulitzer pioneers “yellow journalism”

1900
  • U.S. Steel becomes nation’s first billion-dollar corporation (1901)

  • Women’s Trade Union League founded (1903)

  • International Workers of the World founded (1905)

  • Marianna mine disaster (1907)

  • Muller v. Oregon (1908) permits state regulation of women’s working hours

  • Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911)

  • Rising immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe

  • Height of eugenics (1900s–1920s)

  • Increasing numbers of blacks move to cities; responses include “race riots” by whites

  • Japanese immigrants barred from becoming U.S. citizens (1906)

  • Lacey Act (1900)

  • Antiquities Act (1906) gives president authority to create and protect national monuments

  • National Audubon Society forms (1901)

  • Newlands Reclamation Act (1902)

  • First national wildlife refuge created (1903)

  • U.S. Forest Service created (1905)

  • National Park Service created (1916)

  • William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president (1901)

  • Niagara Movement calls for full voting rights and equal opportunities for blacks

  • Women’s suffrage movement grows

  • Nickelodeons introduce commercial motion pictures

  • Custom of unchaperoned “dating” arises

  • Rise of the Negro Leagues

  • Peak in overseas missionary activity

  • Advent of literary and artistic modernism