Changes in America

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Changes in America
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As America moved closer to the year 1900, great
changes were taking place in the way people
lived.
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In the cities, the Bessemer Process caused
skyscrapers to rise. One of the first designers
was Louis Sullivan.
Sullivan designed the Wainwright Building in St
Louis.
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Wainwright Building
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His contemporary was Daniel Burnham, who designed
the Flatiron Building in New York City.
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Flatiron Building
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Frederick Law Olmstead was a different kind of
designer. He started the movement to build
planned city parks.
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Olmstead drew up the plan for New York Citys
Central Park.
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In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright became the
first men to fly a powered aircraft at a place
called Kittyhawk, North Carolina.
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The Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics who
experimented with gliders. Eventually they put a
small engine on a glider, and the world was
changed.
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George Eastman changed the way people took
pictures by inventing rolled film. The small,
hand-held camera that used the film, called the
Kodak, made photography available to everyone.
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After the Civil War, education changed as well.
Between 1865 and 1895, state laws were passed
requiring 12 to 16 weeks of school attendance by
kids 8 to 14. By 1900, more than half a million
students attended high school.
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In 1896, the Supreme Court decided in the case
Plessy v. Ferguson that separate but equal
facilities for blacks and whites were legal.
This led to a wave of black and white schools,
restaurants, bathrooms, theaters, and many other
things. This separation of the races is called
segregation.
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As a result, governments all over the country
passed laws to keep the races separate. These
were called Jim Crow Laws, and today they are
very illegal. Black Americans could be punished
severely for not complying with Jim Crow Laws.
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One of the most damaging of the Jim Crow Laws was
the poll tax, which forced people to pay a heavy
fee in order to vote. White people were excused
from paying the tax by what is called a
Grandfather Clause which said if your
grandfather could legally vote, you didnt have
to pay the tax. At this time, the grandfathers
of most Southern African Americans had been what?
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In response to discrimination, two African
American leaders arose. Booker T. Washington
said that to end discrimination, blacks should
work hard, be patient, and over time, racism
would go away. He said the more blacks
complained about racism, the more racist whites
became.
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WEB Dubois thought Washington was wrong. He
wanted an immediate end to racism, and advocated
education for blacks. He founded the Niagara
Movement to help African Americans go to college.
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Debt peonage was a form of legalized slavery, in
which people were forced to labor for free in
order to work off a debt. One of the most common
forms of debt peonage was sharecropping, in which
people raised crops on a landlords farm, and
gave him a share of the crops for rent. At the
end of the year, though, the people generally
owed more money than the value of the crops, and
they were required by law to stay there year
after year.
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Despite all this turmoil, however, this was a
time of more free time, called leisure time for
most Americans. The rise of the eight hour
workday and the 40 hour work week, gave Americans
time for biking, tennis, baseball, and even
amusement parks.
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The post-Civil War Period was a time of
unfairness and discrimination. But it was also a
time of progress and advancement. As historians,
we must be careful to look at any one period and
characterize it as either bad or good, because it
all depends on what specific event youre looking
at, and what your perspective is.