ESPANSIONI DI TESTO

MODULE D - The Gilded Age (p. 185)

TASK
Read the text below and highlight
- the main industries of this period
- the inventions that were to change people's lives
- the negative aspects of economic prosperity

Within a few years of the Civil War the USA became a major industrial power. Soon textile mills were springing up all over the South. Meat-packing plants appeared in Chicago and the Middle West, and steel and copper mills in the northeastern regions. Coal mining came to the Appalachians and agriculture spread all over the nation. The petroleum industry prospered and John D. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Company became one of the richest men in America. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and the expansion of railroads created new markets throughout the United States.
New inventions such as the telephone, electric bulb and motor vehicle facilitated industry and eased the everyday life of nearly everyone, while the phonograph, the radio and the motion picture industry created leisure opportunities unimaginable just a few short years before.
Not surprisingly, this new land of opportunity attracted people from many parts of the world, who flocked to the new cities to work in the factories. New construction techniques not only provided untold numbers of jobs but also made it possible to build seemingly miraculous skyscrapers which were to become so characteristic of American city architecture.
There was a downside to this rampant expansionism, of course. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to one half of industrial workers still lived in poverty, and the slums of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities were a national disgrace. People began to organize to demand improvements. In 1881 the American Federation of Labour (AFL) was formed to fight industrial exploitation and by 1900 it counted more than 500,000 members. Also around 1900 the Progressive Movement was formed to improve social conditions through government action. Meanwhile, black people, especially those who had remained in the South, still suffered the consequences of tremendous discrimination and violence, and the treatment of Native Americans was unspeakable.
Many people continued to push west to fill the lands the Government had seized from the Indians and opened up to homesteaders. In two land races in 1889 and 1893, 50,000 settlers arrived in Oklahoma alone. Thus new towns and cities spread throughout the West.