A Second Industrial Revolution — driven by coal, steel, manufacturing and transportation — was rapidly building the nation.

Fueled by the capital and vision of titans like John D. Rockefeller in oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel and William Henry Vanderbilt in railroads, American industry was humming. There was work to be had and fortunes to be made.

The 1880s formed the heart of what would come to be known as the “Gilded Age,” when industry spawned a social elite but also gave rise to a growing middle class, disposable income and institutions that would reshape American life for generations to come.

Yet things weren’t all glitter and gold.

Workers in those humming factories, coal mines and steel mills faced grueling and dangerous conditions. Many lived in “company towns” where the company kept them and their families in perpetual poverty.

In America’s cities, the immigrant poor — the “other half” — lived in conditions that shocked readers of New York’s Sun when trailblazing photographer Jacob Riis first published his images of the city’s gritty slums in 1888.

The gilded decade was also tainted by discrimination and racism.

On the frontier, violence and public policy forced Native Americans from traditional homelands. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. and exacerbated prejudice and violence. And in the South, where Democrats returned to power following the end of Reconstruction, African Americans faced a surge of racial violence, Jim Crow legislation and disenfranchisement.

Still, the glimpses of glitter and gold inspired Americans — and many around the world — to take their chance in a nation that was inexorably on the march to the future.

The 1880 Census found a diverse society that for the first time exceeded 50 million — an increase of more than 30% from one decade earlier. Between 11% and 13% were foreign-born, and another 10% to 11% were the children of immigrants.

Census takers, including women for the first time, had personally visited every residence, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. They recorded names, addresses, marital status, household composition, birthplace, literacy, race, occupation and disabilities such as blindness and “insanity.” They also collected information on transportation, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, religion, education, media, wages and more.

All this data was recorded and tabulated by hand — a process that took eight long years. The Bureau swore “never again!” and tasked inventor Herman Hollerith to develop a punch-card tabulation machine to process the next one.

Now a generation removed from the Civil War, the decade of the 1880s was time for many to mend old wounds and remember the dead.

In the North, veterans’ groups like the Grand Army of the Republic took the lead, erecting hundreds of battlefield and cemetery monuments to their comrades. In the South, women’s groups like the Ladies Memorial Associations spearheaded efforts to erect monuments and provide proper burials for as many as 200,000 Confederate dead.

Two of the nation’s great monuments were dedicated during this decade of swelling nationalism.

Commemorating the nation’s founding, the Washington Monument was finally dedicated on Feb. 21, 1885, after more than 37 years of construction. The public would get its first breathtaking view from the top three years later.

Greeting immigrants in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated Oct. 28, 1886, following New York City’s first ticker-tape parade.

A gift of the people of France through fundraising efforts, according to the National Park Service, the statue depicts the Roman goddess of liberty stamping on the chains of slavery and holding a tablet commemorating the Declaration of Independence.

Funding for the pedestal was promoted by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer — himself an immigrant from the Kingdom of Hungary — who printed the name of every contributor, even children who donated a few cents from their earnings.

In an election that pitted a self-made Congressman against a Gettysburg war hero, Ohio Republican James A. Garfield narrowly defeated fellow Civil War veteran Winfield Scott Hancock in November 1880.

But the popular Garfield would serve just more than 100 days before he was shot July 2, 1881, in a Washington, D.C., train station by a desperate officeseeker, Charles Guiteau.

In an “80-day crisis,” the 20th president languished with infection after doctors failed to extract the bullet.

Perhaps no one less expected Chester A. Arthur to become president than Vice President Chester A. Arthur, but upon Garfield’s death on Sept. 20, 1881, the former New York attorney and customs office director was sworn into office.

Arthur would serve only three and a half years, ceding the Oval Office to Democrat Grover Cleveland in March 1885.

As Americans celebrated a somber July 4, 1881, unsure of their president’s fate, something brighter was happening in eastern Alabama, thanks to the efforts of an unlikely set of collaborators: a “former slave,” a “former slave owner” and other community leaders.

The Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers — later Tuskegee Institute — opened in a church to train African American teachers in the Jim Crow South. Its first principal, the iconic Booker T. Washington, later purchased 100 acres of a former plantation for the school.

Demonstrating a core belief in self-reliance and the value of an industrial education, Washington and his students constructed the early buildings by hand, according to the university.

The institution would become the home of the famous Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and countless notable alumni, including Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison, “Stuck on You” musician Lionel Richie and The Commodores.

The Census Bureau’s punch-card machine was only one of many practical innovations of the 1880s.

“Long math” — the bane of schoolchildren and bankers alike — met its match in the 1880s, when William Burroughs patented the first practical “adding machine” in 1885.

That same year, Fort Wayne, Ind., grocery store owner Jake Gumper dispensed kerosene to his customers using the very first fuel pump, an invention by Sylvanus Bowser, according to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.

Josephine Cochran’s 1886 “dish-washing machine” could have been a dream come true for homemakers were it not for a steep price tag. Instead, the entrepreneurial Cochran founded her own company and sold the device to high-end hotels and restaurants. Everyday consumers would have to wait.

Thomas Edison’s incandescent “electric-lamp,” patented in January 1880, spelled the end of the gaslight era and launched the electric age, according to the National Archives.

While many were fearful of the new technology, they had to admit: it was practical.

Within a month, towns like Wabash, Ind., installed electric lights in their public squares. That summer, two “department store” baseball teams faced off in Massachusetts in the “first experiment in night baseball,” according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

In December, Broadway became the first electrically lit street in the country, earning its moniker, “The Great White Way.” And back in his Menlo Park, N. J., laboratory, a 33-year-old Edison hung the first string of electric lights for Christmas, according to the Library of Congress.

Inventions of the 1880s didn’t only solve practical problems. They also opened new avenues for fun and creativity.

While railroads were decades old, New Yorkers were the first to enjoy a “gravity pleasure ride,” America's first “purpose-built” roller coaster.

The Switchback Railway prompted both “shouts of laughter and screams of fright” from patrons at Coney Island when it opened in 1884. For a nickel, thrill-seekers climbed a tower for a heart-stopping 6-mph, one-way trip, according to roller coaster historian Scott Rutherford.

In Rochester, N.Y., George Eastman invented the first photographic film in 1884. The lightweight material made the bulky glass plates of previous generations obsolete. Just four years later, Americans were capturing their own “Kodak moments” with their own handheld cameras.

Though they remained separate cities throughout the 19th century, Manhattan Island and nearby Brooklyn, N.Y., were intimately connected, with people and goods streaming daily across the East River.

But ferries and boats were unreliable and often insufficient.

The solution? A weatherproof, steel-wire suspension bridge that would boost commerce and stimulate development — a functional monument to symbolize the important collaboration of the cities.

The Brooklyn Bridge, however, took more than 13 years to build, caused hundreds of injuries to workers and claimed at least 27 lives — among them, chief engineer John A. Roebling, a one-time resident of Butler County, who died of tetanus after his foot was crushed.

Roebling’s daughter-in-law, Emily Warren Roebling, saw the project through to completion in 1883. The bridge was hailed as a “marvel of human ingenuity and engineering skill.”

Clara Barton was worshipped in the 1880s.

A heroine of the Civil War, the Massachusetts native had nursed the sick and wounded on the battlefield and in hospitals. After the war, she ran the ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, locating the remains of more than 22,000 men and burying more than 13,000 Union soldiers at Georgia’s notorious Andersonville prison camp.

When she visited Washington, D.C., in 1881, she was greeted by scores of devoted Union army veterans in military uniform, according to the National Republican newspaper.

Turning her attention to long-term solutions, the 59-year-old Barton established one of the nation’s great institutions, the American Red Cross, that same year, to bring relief to Americans during times of disaster and conflict. Barton led the organization for 23 years.

American labor unions had worked for decades to organize and improve conditions. But on Sept. 5, 1882, about 10,000 bricklayers, textile workers and other unionized laborers turned out for a celebration: the nation’s first “Labor Day” parade in New York City.

Still, trouble lay ahead for organized labor. As workers rallied in Chicago for an 8-hour workday, an unknown assailant threw a bomb at city police, killing seven. In the melee that followed, at least four strikers were also killed.

Four labor leaders were executed for conspiracy following the Haymarket Riot of 1886, and the affair tainted the reputation of organized labor.

Despite this setback, a new association, one that would prove more strategic and resilient than its predecessors, was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in December 1886. Under its first and longtime president, Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor or the “A.F. of L.” would become one of the nation’s great institutions for the nation’s workers.

While the nation’s elite collected paintings and enjoyed opera, balls and the symphony, the arts of the 1880s weren’t all violins and “cultivated” tastes.

A growing number of music halls and vaudeville shows — often respectable, sometimes bawdy — drew huge crowds, while dime novels and serialized fiction provided popular and affordable entertainment with their tales of adventure and romance.

With three rings of wild animals, acrobats and other exotic attractions, the Barnum & Bailey Circus debuted in 1881 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Three years later, the 73-year-old P.T. Barnum took advantage of the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge to parade 17 camels and 21 elephants — including the famous “Jumbo” — to gin up attention for his show.

The idea of an American West imbued with fortune, violence and romance was captured in 19th century art and literature, while newspapers recorded the derring-do of larger-than-life outlaws and lawmen like Billy the Kid (killed by gunshot in 1881), Jesse James (killed by gunshot in 1882) and lawman Wyatt Earp, who survived the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Riding this wave of cultural iconography, Buffalo Bill Cody brought scripted “live action” Western culture to audiences around the nation and the world in one of the longest-running acts in American history, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” founded in Omaha, Neb., in 1883. The production featured animals and simulated battles, stars like sharpshooter Annie Oakley and iconic figures like the great Lakota leader Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake).

Meanwhile, “real” cowboys converged on Prescott, Ariz., for the first organized, professional rodeo competition on July 4, 1888. Merging the traditions of Mexican vaqueros and Anglo cowboys, Prescott’s “cowboy tournament” featured prizes for bronco riding, steer roping and cow pony races, according to the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame.

Connecticut factory worker Art Botsford later recalled that Saturday had been a beautiful spring day, according to the New England Historical Society. But by the evening of Sunday, March 11, 1888, the “Great White Hurricane” had arrived.

By lunchtime Monday, snow was piled waist-high in many locations. With transportation and communication at a standstill, many were stranded. The New York Times reported that thousands of people had dangerously crossed the East River on the ice.

The three-day storm racked up a slew of grim statistics, according to the New England Historical Society: up to 60 inches of snow, drifts up to 40 feet high, 200 wrecked ships and as many as 400 deaths.

Nearly 20 million tons of water suddenly swept into Johnstown, Pa., on May 31, 1889, bringing the decade to a close with one of the greatest civilian tragedies in U.S. history.

The contents of the swollen South Fork Dam picked up speed as it careened 14 miles through the narrow Little Conemaugh River valley in a wave up to 40 feet high. Reaching a speed of 40 mph, the water swept away homes, railcars, barbed wire, animals and people along its route, according to Heritage Johnstown, until it slammed into Johnstown.

Much of the wreckage — 30 acres’ worth — was smashed against the Stone Bridge, where oil from ruptured fuel tanks ignited.

Many of the 2,209 victims of the flood and associated fires were never found. Records from the morgue at the Fourth Ward School-House note the remains of one male child, estimated to be “a few days old.” He was just one of hundreds of children who died in the disaster.

Rushing to the scene, 67-year-old Clara Barton and her team of 50 doctors and nurses delivered emergency care, housed families and delivered aid, according to the National Park Service. It was the American Red Cross’s first major disaster relief effort.

Katrina Jesick Quinn is a faculty member at Slippery Rock University. She is an editor of “From the Arctic to the Orient: Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age” (McFarland) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (Routledge).