TIMELINE

1863

  • Cleveland, Ohio, becomes nation’s petroleum refining center

1865

  • Chicago’s Union Stock Yard opens

1867

  • National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry founded

1869

  • Knights of Labor founded

1875

  • John Wanamaker opens nation’s first department store in Philadelphia

1876

  • Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone

1877

  • San Francisco mob attacks Chinatown

  • Great Railroad Strike

1878

  • Greenback-Labor Party elects 15 Congressmen.

1879

  • Henry George publishes Progress and Poverty

1882

  • John D. Rockefeller creates Standard Oil Trust

  • Congress passes Chinese Exclusion Act

1884

  • Knights of Labor at peak of membership

1885

  • Rock Springs massacre of Chinese miners

1886

  • Haymarket Square violence

  • American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded

1887

  • Hatch Act

  • Interstate Commerce Act

1889

  • New Jersey passes law enabling trusts to operate in the state

1892

  • Homestead lockout

1893

  • Severe depression hits; causes mass unemployment and wave of corporate mergers

1900

  • America’s one hundred largest companies control one-third of national productive capacity

1901

  • J. P. Morgan creates U.S. Steel, America’s first billion-dollar corporation

1907

  • Marianna, Pennsylvania, mine disaster

1908

  • Walter Dill publishes The Psychology of Advertising