Progressivism: A Short History Of Colonial America

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions available now:
AFRICAN HISTORY

John Parker and Richard Rathbone
AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES
AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel
THE AMERICAN
PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones

CATHOLICISM Gerald O’Collins
THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
CHAOS Leonard Smith
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson
CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead

ANARCHISM Colin Ward

CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy

ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw

CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
ANCIENT WARFARE

Harry Sidebottom

Helen Morales
CLASSICS

Mary Beard and John Henderson

ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman

CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard

THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair

THE COLD
About a third of them lived in the Midwest, another third in the South, two in seven in the Northeast, and fewer than one in twentyfive in the vast West. More than 43,000,000 were white.
Fewer than 7,000,000 were African American, of whom over
90 percent lived in the South. Thirteen percent were born in other places, led by Germany, Ireland, Canada, Britain, and
Scandinavia, in that order. The only nonwhite minorities, other than blacks, were about 100,000 Chinese (nearly all in West
Coast cities or railroad stops) and perhaps 400,000 American
Indians, also living mainly in the West. In short, the majority of the population was homogeneous, white, and native-born, but it also included sizeable minorities of blacks in the South,
Asians and Indians in the West, and immigrants in eastern and midwestern cities.
What did they do? They farmed, more than anything else.
Sometime during the 1870s those who worked on farms began to be outnumbered by those who did other work, but not by any single kind. The nonfarmers divided mainly among factory workers, service workers, professionals, business people, and commercial workers. Americans had always been a
The total output of the American economy and the gross national product actually increased during the 1870s. During that decade, settlers and ranchers continued to invade the Indian lands of the Great Plains, with the most famous of several confrontations occurring at the Little Big Horn River in Montana in June 1876, when an army detachment under Lt. Col. George A. Custer was wiped out by Sioux warriors led by Crazy Horse. The national depression of 1873–78 helped end Reconstruction in the South, suppressed immigration, and demolished the security and well-being of people all across the industrializing Northeast and
Great Lakes. Unemployment laid low thousands of families.
Plagues of grasshoppers in Minnesota and elsewhere in the upper
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The predicament: the discontents of the Gilded Age

The Great Railway Strike of 1877 was not the only disturbance. In
1882 the already large oil-producing companies controlled by John
D. Rockefeller were combined into the Standard Oil Trust, forming a corporation that by itself controlled, monopolistically, a vital industry. The U.S. Supreme Court in rulings at that time