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
• Justifying Inequality: Gospel of Wealth, Social Darwinism, and Their Critics14 min · 3 objectivesExplain Social Darwinism, laissez-faire, and the Gospel of Wealth as distinct ideas · Compare critiques offered by the Social Gospel, reformers, and labor · Analyze how courts used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations
• Building Jim Crow: Disfranchisement, Segregation, and Black Responses15 min · 3 objectivesExplain the legal devices used to disfranchise Black voters after 1877 · Analyze Plessy v. Ferguson and the reach of legal segregation · Compare the strategies of Washington, Du Bois, and Wells
• Populism: A Program, Not Just a Protest14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the specific economic grievances of late-nineteenth-century farmers · Describe the Omaha Platform and the free silver argument · Analyze why Populism collapsed and what survived it

Every term in Unit 6

All 38 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.

United States v. Cruikshank (1876)

Held the Fourteenth Amendment restrained states, not private individuals, gutting federal prosecution of white terrorist violence after the Colfax massacre.

Civil Rights Cases (1883)

Struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on state-action grounds, legalizing private discrimination in public accommodations for eighty years.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific (1886)

Treated corporations as persons entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection — the amendment written for freedpeople becoming a corporate shield.

Substantive due process

Doctrine that laws restricting economic liberty could be struck down as deprivations of property, used against wage and hour laws and culminating in Lochner (1905).

Wabash v. Illinois (1886)

Held that states could not regulate interstate railroad rates, which forced the question to Congress and produced the Interstate Commerce Act.

Grandfather clause

Exempted from literacy and property tests men whose ancestors had voted before 1867 — facially race-neutral, in effect whites-only.

Poll tax

Payment required well before an election, often cumulative, which disfranchised poor Black and white voters without ever mentioning race.

White primary

Restricted the only meaningful election to a private party contest closed to Black voters, evading the Fifteenth Amendment entirely.

Understanding clause

Required an applicant to explain a constitutional passage to a white registrar's satisfaction — unlimited discretion by design.

Convict leasing

States arrested Black men on petty charges and leased their labor to railroads, mines and plantations, exploiting the Thirteenth Amendment's punishment clause. Death rates sometimes exceeded slavery's.

Crop-lien system

Merchants advanced supplies against the coming harvest at high interest, so debt renewed annually and rarely cleared — the economic mechanism binding sharecroppers in place.

Atlanta Compromise (1895)

Washington's public bargain: vocational training and economic self-help in exchange for temporary acquiescence in segregation, on the theory that economic value would compel rights.

Omaha Platform (1892) planks

Free silver, graduated income tax, public ownership of railroads and telegraph, the subtreasury plan, direct election of senators, secret ballot, initiative and referendum, eight-hour day.

Wilmington coup (1898)

Armed whites overthrew the elected biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina and killed an unknown number of Black residents — the violent end of Southern Fusion politics.

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.
• Do not caricature Washington as passive or Du Bois as impractical. Washington quietly financed lawsuits against disfranchisement; Du Bois built a mass organization that won cases for sixty years. A strong answer treats them as **competing strategies under severe constraint**, which is what the rubric's "complexity" point rewards.

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