Consider the following questions:
1) Do you feel the title The Robber Barons as applied to the post Civil War industrialists is justified? Why or why not?
2) Who among the so-called Robber Barons is your hero? Who, if anyone, would you consign to the lower reaches of Hell?
3) In addition to the industrial revolution which gave such a fillip to the possibilities of generating wealth from the conversion or manufacturing process, there was a significant agricultural revolution. What were its components? What were its problems? Have these problems been resolved?
4) Discuss the fictions and realities surrounding the theory of the protective tariff? What did it protect? Did it really protect? Who actually paid the tariffs?
5) In the post-Civil War era, a new concept developed that challenged the then sacrosanct theory of Adam Smith, that the proliferation of competitors imposed an automatic limit to the price that can be charged for any item. Now, giant industrial entities were developed, whose managers tried to control the market, claiming that the efficiencies of scale in itself would be an effective leveler of prices. Now, consider the possibilities of competition as a regulating device in the period before the Civil War and after it, when the giant factory complexes were being built. Can competition regulate prices when there are of necessity only a few producers? What other check on prices are possible?
6) Consider the relationship among industrialization, the rise of cities, migration, and immigration and problems these relationships developed.