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Tales as Old as Time A flippin’ book about how the Gilded Age came to be. Through trial and error, it managed to uprise and become a successful age of humanity.

Immigration Americans encouraged relatively free and open immigration during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and rarely questioned that policy until the late 1800s. After certain states passed immigration laws following the Civil War, the Supreme Court in 1875 declared regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. They left because of economic, religious and political factors. Some came to avoid war, corrupt governments or religious persecution.

Irish Immigration Throughout the Famine years, nearly a million Irish arrived in the United States. Famine immigrants were the first big wave of poor refugees ever to arrive in the U.S. and Americans were simply overwhelmed. Upon arrival in America, the Irish found the going to be quite tough. With no one to help them, they immediately settled into the lowest rung of society and waged a daily battle for survival. The roughest welcome of all would be in Boston, Massachusetts, an Anglo-Saxon city with a population of about 115,000. It was a place run by descendants of English Puritans, men who could proudly recite their lineage back to 1620 and the Mayflower ship.

Nativism Advocates of Nativism hold the belief that certain skills or abilities are \"native\" or ingrained into the brain at birth. Nativism encompassed the conviction that the interests of established US residents should be given a favored status compared to new immigrants. Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th American President who served in office from September 14, 1901 to March 4, 1909. One of the important events during his presidency was the rise of Nativism in America.

SkyScrapers and PublicTransportation Between 1880 and 1900, cities in the United States grew at a dramatic rate. Owing most of their population growth to the expansion of industry, U.S. cities grew by about 15 million people in the two decades before 1900. Many of those who helped account for the population growth of cities were immigrants arriving from around the world. A steady stream of people from rural America also migrated to the cities during this period. Between 1880 and 1890, almost 40 percent of the townships in the United States lost population because of migration.

Tenement Housing In the 19th century, more and more people began crowding into America’s cities, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants seeking a better life than the one they had left behind. In New York City–where the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880–buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population. Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation. By 1900, some 2.3 million people (a full two-thirds of New York City’s population) were living in tenement housing.

Urbanization Problems Between 1880 and 1900, cities in the United States grew at a dramatic rate. Owing most of their population growth to the expansion of industry, U.S. cities grew by about 15 million people in the two decades before 1900. Many of those who helped account for the population growth of cities were immigrants arriving from around the world. A steady stream of people from rural America also migrated to the cities during this period. Between 1880 and 1890, almost 40 percent of the townships in the United States lost population because of migration.

Political Machines As cities and their problems grew rapidly the political environment changed. No longer did politicians run small manageable cities. These were big cities with big city problems and the government structures designed to cope with these problems grew. As the government grew it became the livelihood for many professional politicians. Some would argue that these politicians were corrupt, they would argue that they provided a needed service. Political Machines were orgainizations that provided social services and jobs in exchange foir votes. The machines were run by a boss who in turn had precinct captains, ward captains and district captains underneath him. All of them made sure that the poor has what they needed. They also made sure the poor voted... for them!

Tammany Hall Tammany Hall was the name given to the Democratic political machine that dominated New York City politics from the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854 through the election of Fiorello LaGuardia in 1934. The eighty-year period between those two elections marks the time in which Tammany was the city's driving political force, but its origins actually date to the late eighteenth century and its fall from power was not truly complete until the early 1960s.

Social Darwinism In 1859, Charles Darwin published Origin of Species, which explained his theory of animal and plant evolution based on \"natural selection.\" Soon afterward, philosophers, sociologists, and others began to adopt the idea that human society had also evolved. The British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote about these ideas even before Darwin's book was published. He became the most influential philosopher in applying Darwin's ideas to social evolution. Born in 1820, Herbert Spencer taught himself about the natural sciences. For a brief time, he worked as a railroad surveyor and then as a magazine writer. Spencer never married, tended to worry a lot about his health, and preferred work to life's enjoyments.

Gospel of Wealth The Gospel of Wealth, or sometimes the Gospel of Success, was the term for a notion promoted by many successful businessmen that their massive wealth was a social benefit for all. The Gospel of Wealth was a softer and more palatable version of Social Darwinism. The advocates linked wealth with responsibility, arguing that those with great material possessions had equally great obligations to society. No formal organization existed to put forth this viewpoint

Reforms The 1820s and 1830s saw a great rise in popular politics, as free white males achieved universal suffrage. Women, blacks, and Native Americans, however, remained excluded from the political process and were often neglected by politicians. In protest, these marginalized groups and their sympathizers organized reform movements to heighten public awareness and to influence social and political policy. Many reformers believed that they were doing God’s work, and the Second Great Awakening did much to encourage them in their missions.

Realism in Art Though never a coherent group, Realism is recognized as the first modern movement in art, which rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in France in the 1840s, Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions of what constituted art. Working in a chaotic era marked by revolution and widespread social change, Realist painters replaced the idealistic images and literary conceits of traditional art with real-life events, giving the margins of society similar weight to grand history paintings and allegories. Their choice to bring everyday life into their canvases was an early manifestation of the avant-garde desire to merge art and life, and their rejection of painterly techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many twentieth-century definitions and redefinitions of modernism.

Populist and PopulistParty The Populist movement was a revolt by farmers in the South and Midwest against the Democratic and Republican Parties for ignoring their interests and difficulties. For over a decade, farmers were suffering from crop failures, falling prices, poor marketing, and lack of credit facilities. Many farmers were in debt due to a drought that affected the Midwest in the 1880s. At the same time, prices for Southern cotton dropped. These disasters, combined with resentment against railroads, money-lenders, grain-elevator owners, and others with whom farmers did business, led farmers to organize.