USA: Industry and immigration
The late nineteenth century was an era of massive immigration to North America from the rest of the world, with influxes from Europe to the east coast paralleled by those from Asia to the West. As in colonial times, national groups tended to form enclaves in specific areas - examples range from the Scandinavian farmers of Minnesota and the northern Plains, to the Basque shepherds of Idaho, and the Cornish miners of Colorado. In the Southwest, where individual hard work counted for less than shared communal effort, the Mormons of Utah had fled persecution eastward across the United States to become the first white settlers to eke a living from the unforgiving desert.The fastest growth of all was in the nation's greatest cities , especially New York, Chicago and Boston. Their industrial and commercial strength enabled them to attract and absorb migrants not only from throughout Europe but also from the Old South - particularly ex-slaves, who could now at least vote with their feet.
Now that it stretched "from sea to shining sea," the territorial boundaries of the US had reached almost their current form. In 1867, however, Secretary of State William Seward agreed to buy Alaska from the crisis-torn Russian government for $7.2 million. The purchase was at first derided as "Seward's Folly," but it was not long before the familiar Midas touch of the Americans was revealed by the discovery of gold there as well. Finally, the Kingdom of Hawaii , far out in the Pacific, was annexed in 1898 following the 1894 "Revolution," led by white American businessmen, which even then-President Cleveland condemned as "wholly without justification … not merely wrong but a disgrace."
The various US presidents of the day, from the victorious General Grant (a man palpably out of his depth) onwards, now seem anonymous figures compared to the industrialists and financiers who manipulated the national economy. These " robber barons " included such men as John D. Rockefeller, who controlled seventy percent of the world's oil almost before anyone else had realized it was worth controlling; Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune introducing the Bessemer process of steel manufacture; and J.P. Morgan, who went for the most basic commodity of all - money. Their success was predicated on the willingness of the government to cooperate in resisting the development of a strong labor movement. A succession of widely publicized strikes - such as those on the railroads in 1877, in the mines of Tennessee in 1891 and in the steel mills of Pittsburgh in 1892 - were forcibly crushed.
The nineteenth century had also seen the development of a distinctive American voice in literature , which rendered increasingly superfluous the efforts of passing English visitors - such as Charles Dickens, and the Trollopes, mother and son - to "explain" the United States. From the 1830s onwards, a wide range of writers set out to find new ways to describe their new world, with results as varied as the introspective essays of Henry Thoreau, the morbid visions of Edgar Allan Poe, the all-embracing novels of Herman Melville, and the irrepressible poetry of Walt Whitman, whose endlessly revised Leaves of Grass was an exultant hymn to the young republic. Virtually every leading participant in the Civil War wrote at least one highly readable volume of memoirs, while public figures as disparate as Buffalo Bill Cody and the showman P. T. Barnum also produced lively autobiographies. The boundless national self-confidence found its greatest expression in the vigorous vernacular style of Mark Twain , whose depictions of frontier life, whether in the journalistic Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi , or fictionalized in novels like Huckleberry Finn , gave the rest of the world perhaps its most abiding impression of the American character.
At the end of the century, despite an erratic boom-and-bust cycle that hit its lowest point in 1893, the United States had advanced to the point that it knew, even if the rest of the world wasn't yet altogether sure, that it was the strongest, wealthiest country on earth. As the empires of Europe embarked upon their long, slow disintegration, the United States was even toying with colonialist ventures of its own. For a brief period it seemed as if the Philippines might pass into permanent US control, while the escapades of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in Cuba presaged a century of ongoing US involvement in Latin America.
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