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The Between 1877 And 1920 Essay

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1. Between 1877 and 1920 America emerged as a leading industrial and urban nation. Discuss the challenges faced by three of the following groups: business, labor, the city, and farmers. How did each of these sectors endeavor to find stability through a search for order through organization? Businesses, laborers, and farmers faced major challenges between 1877 and 1920. This was a time period that included both the Gilded Age and World War 1, and the challenges that these three parts of society faced were very different between each group and throughout each period. Businesses had to deal with things called “trusts” with other businesses. Many businesses desired to hold the monopoly of an entire industry, and competition was intense and cutthroat. Laborers, of course, faced the challenges of not having the previously mentioned working conditions, as well as pay cuts and unemployment during the depressions in the 1870s and the 1890s. Farmers had to deal with major drops in the prices for their crops due to the second Industrial Revolution and the development of new technology, as well as the already-difficult farming of the West. Many southern farmers were sharecroppers, as well, and as the prices for their goods fell, so did their standard of living. Each of these sections tried to find stability in different ways; however, one similarity was that all of them formed some kind of organization. Laborers formed unions, while farmers formed organizations like the Farmer’s

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