Social Sciences and History / Unit 2 SSH 0110 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Sequencing Industrialization's Consequences
The idea
Exam questions on this period ask which development followed which. The anchor's chain runs from technology to business to labor to city to politics. New technologies, above all steel, electricity and communication, made large-scale production possible. Large-scale production concentrated ownership in trusts and integrated firms. Concentrated ownership made wage labor the majority condition and provoked organization: the Knights, then the federation of craft unions. Factories freed from rivers pulled workers into cities, from the countryside, from Europe and from the South. Cities produced machines, graft and reformers. Farmers, squeezed by railroads and tariffs, produced the Alliance and the Populists.
In practice
Given the four items Populist Party, Haymarket affair, Knights of Labor's rise, and Standard Oil's consolidation, the order is consolidation, the Knights, Haymarket, the Populists: the eighteen seventies, the early eighties, eighteen eighty-six, eighteen ninety-one. Given a question asking why the Great Migration and southern European immigration are taught together, the answer is that both fed the same factories in the same decades for the same pull of wages.
Where people slip
The chain is causal, not merely chronological, and the exam tests the causation. A question that puts unions before the wage-labor majority, or Populists before the tariff squeeze, has the arrow backward. Anchor the chain at steel first and the Populists last.
Your place on the trail
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