Period 6: 1865–1898

What this unit covers

The topics below follow the published US History course framework for Unit 6. This unit is worth 10–17% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.

Lessons in this unit

• Industrialization & the Rise of Big Business14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the factors that fueled rapid American industrialization after the Civil War · Analyze the business strategies of industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller · Evaluate competing views of Gilded Age wealth and its justification
• Labor, Immigration & the Growing City13 min · 3 objectivesAnalyze the conditions that gave rise to the labor movement · Explain the patterns and reception of "new immigration" · Describe the challenges and politics of rapid urbanization
• The West & Agrarian Revolt13 min · 3 objectivesExplain how settlement transformed the West and affected Native peoples · Analyze the economic grievances that gave rise to the Populist movement · Evaluate the significance of the Populist Party and the election of 1896

Every term in Unit 6

All 24 terms we publish for Period 6: 1865–1898, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.

Transcontinental Railroad (1869)

Created a national market, standardized time zones and opened the West to settlement — built largely by Chinese and Irish immigrant labor.

Vertical integration

Controlling every stage from raw material to sale, as Carnegie did in steel, to cut costs and suppliers' leverage.

Horizontal integration

Buying or combining competitors in the same business, as Rockefeller did in oil refining, to control price.

Social Darwinism

Applied "survival of the fittest" to society to justify vast inequality and oppose regulation and relief.

Gospel of Wealth

Carnegie's argument that the rich are trustees of society's surplus and should give it away in life — philanthropy as the answer to inequality.

Knights of Labor

Broad union open to skilled and unskilled, women and Black workers, seeking cooperatives and the eight-hour day. Collapsed after Haymarket.

American Federation of Labor

Gompers's federation of skilled craft unions pursuing "bread and butter" gains — wages, hours, conditions — rather than remaking the economy.

Haymarket affair (1886)

A bomb at a Chicago labor rally killed police; the backlash associated unionism with anarchism and destroyed the Knights.

Homestead Strike (1892)

Carnegie steel strike broken by Pinkertons and state militia — a demonstration of capital's power with government behind it.

Pullman Strike (1894)

National rail boycott ended by federal injunction and troops, justified by the need to move the mail. Established the injunction as an anti-strike weapon.

Populist Party

Farmers' party demanding free silver, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators and government ownership of railroads. Many demands later became law.

Free silver

Demand for unlimited coinage of silver to inflate the currency and ease farm debt. Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech made it the 1896 issue.

Granger laws

State laws regulating railroad and grain-elevator rates, upheld in Munn v. Illinois but narrowed by Wabash, which reserved interstate commerce to Congress.

Interstate Commerce Act (1887)

First federal regulatory agency, aimed at railroad rates. Weak in practice, but a precedent for federal economic regulation.

Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)

Banned combinations in restraint of trade. Vague enough that courts first used it mainly against labor unions.

Dawes Act (1887)

Broke reservations into individual allotments to force assimilation and sold the "surplus". Native landholding fell from 138 to 48 million acres.

Wounded Knee (1890)

US troops killed roughly 250 Lakota, many women and children, ending armed Native resistance on the Plains.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

First US law barring immigration by nationality; renewed and expanded until 1943.

New immigration

Post-1880 arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, largely Catholic and Jewish, who settled in cities and provoked nativist reaction.

Political machines

Urban organizations like Tammany Hall trading services and jobs to immigrants for votes — corrupt, but supplying welfare no one else offered.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Upheld "separate but equal", giving constitutional cover to segregation for nearly sixty years.

Booker T. Washington

Urged vocational training and economic self-help before political rights, in the Atlanta Compromise.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Demanded immediate civil and political rights and higher education for the "Talented Tenth"; co-founded the NAACP.

Ida B. Wells

Journalist whose investigations showed lynching was economic and political terror, not punishment for crime, and who campaigned internationally against it.

What examiners penalize here

• Populism "failed" as a party but succeeded as a preview. On the exam, note that Populist demands — **income tax (16th Amendment), direct election of senators (17th), railroad regulation** — later became mainstream Progressive reforms. Tracing that continuity earns strong analysis.

Practice US History

Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.

Questions about this unit

All 9 units of AP United States History

1. Unit 1 · Period 1: 1491–1607
2. Unit 2 · Period 2: 1607–1754
3. Unit 3 · Period 3: 1754–1800
4. Unit 4 · Period 4: 1800–1848
5. Unit 5 · Period 5: 1844–1877
6. Unit 6 · Period 6: 1865–1898
7. Unit 7 · Period 7: 1890–1945
8. Unit 8 · Period 8: 1945–1980
9. Unit 9 · Period 9: 1980–Present