Please read T&S chapter 20. Questions to consider:
1. How did the rise of steel production impact the U.S., including other industries?
2. How did railroads transform the nation in the late 19th century?
3. What were some examples of the emerging national consumer market in the late 19th century?
4. How did John D. Rockefeller create the world’s largest corporation by the end of the 19th century? In other words, what strategies did he use?
5. How did Americans respond to the remarkable growth of large corporations?
6. How did the federal government respond to the emergence of monopolistic businesses?
See also the following political cartoons, which give some sense of the growing American concern about monopolistic corporate power in the late 19th century.
About Mark Souther
I am an associate professor of history at Cleveland State University and public history director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities. I'm the author of New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, editor of American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition (forthcoming), and am researching a new book on perceptions of decline in postwar Cleveland. Apart from my involvement in CPHDH, I authored a recent successful National Register of Historic Places nomination and serve on the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission. My history interests include urban and suburban history, 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history, leisure and tourism, and architecture and historic preservation, not to mention that I'm a self-indulgent hunter-gatherer of antiques and ephemera.
