Joy Hakim

An Age of Extremes

1889-1917

For the captains of industry (sometimes called Robber Barons)--men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford--the Gilded Age is a time of big money. Technology booms with the new trains, telephones, electric lights, harvesters, vacuum cleaners, and more. But for millions of immigrant workers, it is a time of hardship––workers , including children, often toil 12 to 14 hours a day sometimes under dangerous conditions. In Age of Extremes, you'll meet Mother Jones, Ida Tarbell, Big Bill Haywood, Sam Gompers,Theodore Roosevelt and many others. You'll also watch the United States step onto the world stage as it enters the bloody battlefields of Europe in World War I.

"Americans care about individual rights. That has given us strong anti-monopoly feelings; it also makes us want as few laws as possible."

"When Cyrus Hall McCormick opened the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago in the 1840's, he worked alongside his 23 employees. Of course, he knew them all by name. He cared about them... A few years later, the McCormick factory was making more than 1,000 reapers a year. Cyrus still knew all 200 of his workers."

"World war I was worse than anyone could have dreamed. Many of those 19th-century inventions, which people thought would prevent war, were turned to killing. Airplanes shot at each other overhead, machine guns cracked their deadly staccato, submarines ejected killer torpedoes, and poison gas turned men blind or unable to breathe."