Reference
- Andrew Carnegie • The original wealthy philanthropistAndrew Carnegie was born into poverty in Scotland and moved to the United States with his family when he was 12. After a succession of jobs he joined the Pennsylvania Railroad, as a telegraph operator and was quickly promoted. He started investing when only 21, and continued to invest wisely, especially in the burgeoning oil industry. By the time he was 30, he was the principal shareholder in several successful companies, a partner in others, and a respected and powerful businessman and industrialist. After building up the steel industry in Pittsburgh, he sold it to J. P. Morgan, and devoted the rest of his life to his philanthropic activities and writing.
- Vanderbilt, Cornelius (1794 to 1877)Financier and businessman. Vanderbilt, called “Commodore” because of his shipping interests, amassed a steamship and railroad empire and pioneered the nation's transportation system. Beginning by forming ferry and schooner service in New York and along the East Coast, Vanderbilt eventually established a shipping line from the East Coast to California via Nicaragua during the gold rush. When river traffic fell during the Civil War, Vanderbilt gained control of the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1863 and the Hudson River Railroad in 1865. He merged these lines in 1869 with the New York Central Railroad, and by 1873 his lines stretched from New York City to Chicago. Vanderbilt's questionable business tactics contributed to instability in the stock market, and Congress and other authorities investigated his operations. He left a fortune of over $100 million to his family and endowed Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
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Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Perspectives
Ordinary People
David Wagner explores the lives of poor people during the three decades after the Civil War, using a unique treasure of biographies of people who were (at one point in time) inmates in a large almshouse, combined with genealogical and other official records to follow their later lives. Ordinary People develops a more fluid picture of "poverty" as people's lives change over the course of time.
Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality
Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of Henry George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates.
Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
This autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, originally published in 1920, is an account of the authors early years, written mostly from a little bungalow retreat on the moors of Aultnagar in Scotland during the early 20th century.
The New Victorians
During the economic boom of the 1990s, arguments about the moral failings of the poor were used to pass welfare reforms heralded as the solution to a system that had failed everyone. Yet, as historian Stephen Pimpare demonstrates in this revealing social history, remarkably similar arguments were used to disastrous effect in campaigns against aid to the poor in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In The New Victorians, Pimpare reveals the disturbing parallels between the anti-welfare propagandists of the nineteenth century and the elite actors and well-funded policy research organizations of today. Alarmingly, he shows how the New Victorians of today often invoke the rhetoric of their predecessors while ignoring the complete failure of nineteenth-century reforms. The New Victorians goes on to uncover the elite and grassroots resistance in the Gilded Age that paved the way for the counter-reforms of the Progressive Era, revealing urgent lessons toward renewing support for broader state defense of the,poor today.
Andrew Carnegie: The Self-Made Ideal
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This lecture examines the notion of the "self-made man" as it pervaded Gilded Age America. Investigate why this idea took on unprecedented popularity in the 19th century, how it was strongly promoted by figures from Horatio Alger to Andrew Carnegie, and explore how the ideal became entwined with social Darwinism.
Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Modern Firm
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowMeet Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man who was a veritable centerpiece of the Industrial Revolution. You'll learn how this iconic industrialist amassed great wealth and influence, he formed his massive railroad empire, sparked the rise of the modern firm and management hierarchies, and came to epitomize the idea of the self-made individual.
Urban Reform: How the Other Half Lives
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowStudy how progressive reformers responded to the troubles of big cities through urban planning, new thinking about poverty, and the establishment of "settlement houses" and social work to aid the urban poor. Also learn about activism to address alcohol abuse and prostitution, as well as governmental actions to reform housing, urban sanitation, and public health.
Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Gala Ball
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowTake the measure of the new breed of multimillionaire industrialists that emerged in the Gilded Age as a visible public presence. Contrast the earlier American mindset of republican simplicity with the new rich who displayed and flaunted their wealth through vast estates and European-style aristocratic living.
Online Articles
- Beneath the Surface of Tenement Life: The Dialectics of Race and Poverty during America's First Gilded AgeLife during the first Gilded Age in the United States (1865—1925) was a time of considerable social differentiation between rich and poor. Newly arrived immigrants with little money were often relegated to substandard housing in American cities. In this study, I argue that some nonwealthy immigrants were racialized as poor, and I investigate whether this racial categorization created homogeneity in housing and material culture. I use the Five Points district in New York City as my point of investigation, confining my analysis to the late 19th century. My findings are that both tenement housing and artifact possession were generally homogeneous when the analysis is performed at the societal scale.
- Hunger, poverty and the criminalization of food sharing in the new Gilded AgeIn Part II, I describe the circuit split in the United States Courts of Appeals, which emerged in 2011, when the Eleventh Circuit en banc upheld the constitutionality of the City of Orlando's complicated permitting requirements against the religious and social activists who sought to share food with hungry people in public parks within a two-mile radius of city hall.10 I discuss First Vagabonds Church of God v. City of Orlando in detail and contrast its reasoning and result with a 2006 Ninth Circuit case, Santa Monica Food Not Bombs v. City of Santa Monica, which held unconstitutional a municipal events ordinance that regulated uses of public property, including food sharing, for not being narrowly tailored, as required by First Amendment freedom of speech jurisprudence.11 Contrasting these cases traces the contours of the circuit split and enables me to summarize what their jurisprudence suggests as to the state of the law regarding the municipal regulation of food sharing in publicly-owned places.