In the 1880s America poured steel, laid rail, and filled the last open spaces of the continent. Andrew Carnegie’s mills transformed iron into the backbone of a new industrial power. Homesteaders raced across the Plains, the Chinese Exclusion Act closed one gate, and the 1890 Census declared the frontier gone. Jim Rand walks through the decade when steam and ambition closed one chapter of American life and opened another — and ordinary people on both sides of the color line, the factory gate, and the reservation paid the price of that transformation.

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