A-Factories often employed entire families, including children. B-Fathers often left their families to find work in factories. C-Mothers often left their families to find work in factories.

Industrialization greatly increased the need for workers in the nation’s factories. During the Gilded Age, the economic disparities between the workers and big business owners grew exponentially. Workers continued to endure low wages and dangerous working conditions in order to make a living.

The defining characteristics in the gilded age included individualism, urbanization, new values, art, and forms of entertainment. The Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post? Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century.

By the early twentieth century, more than a million immigrants were entering eastern U.S. cities on a yearly basis. Many immigrants could barely make a living, working as unskilled laborers in factories or packinghouses for low wages.

In dirty, poorly ventilated factories, workers had to perform repetitive, mind-dulling tasks, sometimes with dangerous or faulty equipment. In 1882, an average of 675 laborers were killed in work-related accidents each week. In addition, wages were so low that most families could not survive unless everyone held a job.

Progressives addressed workplace efficiency and safety standards, child labor, workmen’s compensation, minimum wages, and working hours for women. Improvements at home included an increased emphasis on education, helping immigrant families, Prohibition, curbing prostitution, public health, and municipal services.

Mark Twain called the late 19th century the “Gilded Age.” By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism.

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom.

The German, Irish and Italian immigrants who arrived in America during the 1800s often faced prejudice and mistrust. Many had to overcome language barriers. Others discovered that the challenges they had fled from, such as poverty or religious persecution, were to be encountered in America as well.

Fleeing crop failure, land and job shortages, rising taxes, and famine, many came to the U. S. because it was perceived as the land of economic opportunity.

They migrated to America for a variety of reasons. Push factors involved worsening opportunities for farm ownership in central Europe, persecution of some religious groups, and military conscription; pull factors were better economic conditions, especially the opportunity to own land, and religious freedom.

This generation of Italian immigrants, however, stopped and made their homes there; one third never got past New York City. They scattered all over the New York region, settling in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and nearby towns in New Jersey. Perhaps the greatest concentration of all, though, was in Manhattan.

Italian emigration was fueled by dire poverty. Life in Southern Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, offered landless peasants little more than hardship, exploitation, and violence. Even the soil was poor, yielding little, while malnutrition and disease were widespread.