| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Sharecropper | A farmer that works and lives on land owned by someone else. They pay rent by giving a portion of their crop to the landowner |
| Proprietorship | an unincorporated business owned by a single person who is responsible for its liabilities and entitled to its profits |
| Capital | wealth in the form of money or property owned by a person or business and human resources of economic value |
| Corporation | A business organized under stat or federal statutes as a separate legal entity. |
| Dividend | that part of the earnings of a corporation that is distributed to its shareholders |
| Monopoly | (economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller |
| Conglomerate | a group of diverse companies under common ownership and run as a single organization |
| Pool | any communal combination of funds |
| Trust | a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service |
| Holding Company | a company with controlling shares in other companies |
| Entrepreneur | businessperson (who assumes the risk of a business venture); contractor; ADJ. entrepreneurial |
| Andrew Carnegie | founder of the Carnegie Steel Company |
| John D. Rockefeller | Created Standard Oil |
| J Pierpont Morgan | Banking industry |
| Assembly Line | In a factory, an arrangement where a product is moved from worker to worker, with each person performing a single task in the making of the product. |
| Horatio Alger | United States author of inspirational adventure stories for boys |
| Puritan Work Ethic | you will reap rewards for hard work |
| Laissez Faire | the doctrine that government should not interfere in commercial affairs |
| Social Darwanism | Darwin's theory of evolution to human society for natural selection or survival of the fittest to explain how some companies will flourish while others won't |
| Robber Baron | an American capitalist who acquired a fortune in the late nineteenth century by ruthless means. |
| New South | Term that identified southern promoters' belief in the technologically advanced industrial South |
| Philanthropists | People who practise performing charitable actions |
| Munn vs. Illinois | A Supreme Court Case that allowed the government to regulate railroads |
| ICC | a former independent federal agency that supervised and set rates for carriers that transported goods and people between states |
| Sherman AntiTrust Act | First federal action against monopolies, it was signed into law by Harrison and was extensively used by Theodore Roosevelt for trust-busting. However, it was initially misused against labor unions |
| Collective Bargaining | a process by which management and labor reach agreements through negotiation and compromise |
| Knights of Labor | Labor union founded by Uriah S. Stephens in 1869, that grew out of the collapse of the National Labor Union and was replaced by AF of L after a number of botched strikes |
| Terence Powderly | Eloquent leader of a secretive labor organization that made substantial gains in the 1880s before it suddenly collapsed |
| American Federation of Labor | a labor union that concentrated on "bread and butter" issues: wages and work days while avoiding politics |
| Samuel Gompers | United States labor leader (born in England) who was president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 to 1924 (1850-1924) |
| Bread and Butter Unionism | The belief that unions should focus on improving working conditions and pay for skilled workers rather than political reform |
| ILGWU | union of garment workers formed in 1900 |
| Great Railway Strike | a series of pay cuts for railroad workers led to a strike that spread across several states |
| Haymarket Riot | incident in which a bomb exploded during a lobor protest in Haymarket square in chicago, killing several police officers |
| Homestead Strike | In 1892, 13 men were killed in a battle between striking steelworkers and strikebreakers at Carnegie's steel plant in Pittsburgh |
| Pullman Strike | in Chicago, Pullman cut wages but refused to lower rents in the "company town", Eugene Debs had American Railway Union refuse to use Pullman cars, Debs thrown in jail after being sued, strike achieved nothing |
| Lawrence Textile Strike | Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union of skilled and unskilled workers, led a huge strike against the textile mills |
| Triangle Shirtwaist Fire | In 1911 this fire broke out in NY killing hundreds of people, mostly women, who were trapped behind the doors |
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