section_path: History/Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and Progressive Era (1863 – 1917)
section_name: Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and Progressive Era (1863 – 1917)
paragraph_text: Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and Progressive Era (1863 – 1917)
  
  Efforts toward reconstruction in the secessionist South had begun as early as 1862, but it was only after President Lincoln's assassination that the three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution were ratified to protect civil rights. The amendments codified nationally the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crimes, promised equal protection under the law for all persons, and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or previous enslavement. As a result, African Americans took an active political role in ex-Confederate states in the decade following the Civil War. The former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union, beginning with Tennessee in 1866 and ending with Georgia in 1870.
  
  National infrastructure, including transcontinental telegraph and railroads, spurred growth in the American frontier. This was accelerated by the Homestead Acts, through which nearly 10 percent of the total land area of the United States was given away free to some 1.6 million homesteaders. From 1865 through 1917, an unprecedented stream of immigrants arrived in the United States, including 24.4 million from Europe. Most came through the port of New York City, and New York City and other large cities on the East Coast became home to large Jewish, Irish, and Italian populations, while many Germans and Central Europeans moved to the Midwest. At the same time, about one million French Canadians migrated from Quebec to New England. During the Great Migration, millions of African Americans left the rural South for urban areas in the North. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867.
  
  The Compromise of 1877 is generally considered the end of the Reconstruction era, as it resolved the electoral crisis following the 1876 presidential election and led President Rutherford B. Hayes to reduce the role of federal troops in the South. Immediately, the Redeemers began evicting the Carpetbaggers and quickly regained local control of Southern politics in the name of white supremacy. African Americans endured a period of heightened, overt racism following Reconstruction, a time often called the nadir of American race relations. A series of Supreme Court decisions, including Plessy v. Ferguson, emptied the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of their force, allowing Jim Crow laws in the South to remain unchecked, sundown towns in the Midwest, and segregation in communities across the country, which would be reinforced by the policy of redlining later adopted by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation.
  
  An explosion of technological advancement accompanied by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor led to rapid economic expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, allowing the United States to outpace the economies of England, France, and Germany combined. This fostered the amassing of power by a few prominent industrialists, largely by their formation of trusts and monopolies to prevent competition. Tycoons led the nation's expansion in the railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. The United States emerged as a pioneer of the automotive industry. These changes were accompanied by significant increases in economic inequality, slum conditions, and social unrest, creating the environment for labor unions and socialist movements to begin to flourish. This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which was characterized by significant reforms.
  
  Pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy; the islands were annexed in 1898. That same year, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were ceded to the U.S. by Spain after the latter's defeat in the Spanish–American War. (The Philippines was granted full independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946, following World War II. Puerto Rico and Guam have remained U.S. territories.) American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the Second Samoan Civil War. The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.