Unit 2: Chapter 8

Gilded means "covered with a thin layer of gold," and "Gilded Age" suggests that a thin but glittering layer of prosperity covered the poverty and corruption of much of society.

This hands-off approach to economic matters, known by the French phrase laissez-faire, holds that government should play a very limited role in business.

A subsidy is a payment made by the government to encourage the development of certain key industries, such as railroads.

Instead he appointed qualified political independents to Cabinet posts and fired employees who were not needed. By these actions Hayes began to reform the civil service, or the government's nonelected workers.

Another practice was to offer rebates, or partial refunds, to favored customers.

In Russia, Jews faced hostility from their Christian neighbors and the government. In the 1880s, a wave of pogroms, or violent massacres of Jews, swept across the country.

Most immigrants traveled in steerage, a large open area beneath the ship's deck. Steerage offered limited toilet facilities, no privacy, and poor food, but tickets were relatively cheap.

Those who were found to have a contagious disease such as tuberculosis faced quarantine, a time of isolation to prevent the spread of a disease.

Some urban neighborhoods became ghettos, areas in which one ethnic or racial group dominated.

Still other urban ghettos resulted from restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants were agreements among homeowners not to sell real estate to certain groups of people.

Still other urban ghettos resulted from restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants were agreements among homeowners not to sell real estate to certain groups of people.

Congress responded to the demands of unions and others by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country.

In 1913, California passed the Webb Alien Land Law, which banned alien (noncitizen) Asians from owning farmland.

Those people made their homes in the suburbs, or residential communities surrounding the cities.

Speculators also built many tenements, low-cost apartment buildings designed to house as many families as the owner could pack in.

Graft, or the use of one's job to gain profit, was a major source of income for the machines.

Soon a social reform movement developed within religious institutions. It was called the social gospel movement and it sought to apply the gospel (teachings) of Jesus directly to society.

From this settlement house, a kind of community center, they eventually offered social services.

Philosopher Auguste Comte coined the term sociology to describe the study of how people interact with one another in a society.

Thirty years later this policy of nativism, or favoring native-born Americans over immigrants, reappeared.

Like nativism, another movement begun before the Civil War saw a revival later in the 1800s: the temperance movement, an organized campaign to eliminate alcohol consumption.

They supported prohibition, a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.

As cities grew, drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other forms of vice became big business. Vice (immoral or corrupt behavior) was not unique to the cities. But large urban populations made vice highly visible and very profitable.