| Additional Class Topics
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Additional Class Topics

For Further Interest: Additional Class Topics
Chapter 24: Industry Comes of Age, 1865 - 1900

  • Discuss the railroads as both romantic enterprise (for example, the golden spike, the luxurious Pullman cars) and as controversial exploitative business (for example, the corruption of legislatures, price-fixing).

  • Examine the benefits and drawbacks of industrialization for various groups (business, labor, women, minorities, immigrants).

  • Using Edison as a symbol of the emerging technological and industrial age, show how his inventions were quickly taken up and incorporated into huge new industries.

  • Use the Haymarket affair to illustrate the growing class conflicts in industrial America and to highlight the debates over how American workers should respond to the new industrial conditions.

  • Conduct a class debate over the following topics: e.g., Concentrations of Wealth Harm America, The Organization of Labor into Unions Is Dangerous, A Populist Prescription for Social Reform); readings will come from the following book: Opposing Viewpoints in American History Volume II: From Reconstruction to the Present, San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Another good source of debate topics is Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle, Taking Sides Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History, Volume II: Reconstruction to the Present, Connecticut: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

  • Have the students read selections from Thorstein Veblens The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) in David A. Hollinger and Charles Cappers (Editors) The American Intellectual Tradition: Volume II 1865 to the Present, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.



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