The State of Georgia wanted the land of the Cherokee for settlements by white farmers and miners. The discovery of gold in the land reserved by federal treaties to the Cherokee, a sovereign nation at the time sparked the actions.

The State of Georgia passed a law abolishing the treaties with the Cherokee nation and declaring the land of the Cherokee nation the possession of the State of Georgia. Andrew Jackson supported the actions of the State of Georgia and maneuvered a bill through Congress making the law legal.

The United States Supreme Court found the law unconstitutional. However the State of Georgia with the support of president Andrew Jackson and federal troops forced the Cherokee nation off of their land and forced them to move to Oklahoma. This enforced march has become known as the Trail of Tears. Many of the Cherokee died along the trail. Those that survived mourned the loss of their land in Georgia.

"The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) on August 6, 1965, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States. The act significantly widened the franchise and is considered among the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

The act banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the nonwhite population had not registered to vote, and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections (in 1964, the 24th Amendment made poll taxes illegal in federal elections; poll taxes in state elections were banned in 1966 by the U.S. Supreme Court)."

Source: History.com

There is more than one answer to this question. The Gilded Age lasted from around 1873 (when Mark Twain named it thus) to 1911 (The Triangle Waistcoat Fire ended the party for plutocrat millionaires, who could no longer credibly pretend that they were the good guys for holding back the labor movement in America). During this time, two communications breakthroughs occurred almost simultaneously: the development of the telephone, and the growth of newspaper chains.

The telephone developed gradually. In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell developed and patented the first telephone, and by the end of the decade, about 40,000 of them were in use in the US. They didn't become commonplace in households for several more decades; like all new communications geegaws, they were prohibitively expensive. Today, you likely have one in your pocket or might be reading this on one.

Newspapers, by contrast, were dirt cheap during this period and cost only a few cents. Newspaper readership was a lot more common than telephone ownership, and newspapers tailored their contents to local interests and tastes. Reading the news in San Francisco was a very different experience from reading one in New York.

This changed under William Randolph Hearst, who acquired the San Francisco Daily Examiner in 1887 and the New York Journal in 1895, and he began Hearst's Chicago American in 1900. Other newspapers and a slate of magazines followed. For the first time, readers all over the country were getting the same news and editorial messages.

His rival, Joseph Pulitzer, owned a somewhat smaller chain, including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World.

Today, most newspapers, television stations and radio stations are owned by a small handful of media outlets. This is rooted in the Gilded Age machinations of William Randolph Hearst, one of the drivers of that period.

These innovations originally took place in France, where Honore Blanc proposed the manufacture of interchangeable gun parts, but he was shunned by the industry because the manufacturers of the time relied on being unique.

The Americans liked the idea so they could become independent in artillery manufacture and so promoted interchangeable parts in their own industries.

Although assembly line techniques had been developed as early
as the #12th# century in Venice, the implementation of interchangeable parts allowed American industry to expand on the idea and build huge high-output factories.

The first assembly line for large scale production was the creation of the Olds Motor Company. The success of this venture inspired Henry Ford to develop a moving assembly line to maximize production of his own brand, and large scale production took off from there.

There are images and details here:
http://robohub.org/the-evolution-of-assembly-lines-a-brief-history/

The large planters had invested their capital in worthless Confederate bonds. The planters did not have the money to plant all of their fields.

Large numbers of previous slaves did not return after the Civil War to work the plantations. This created a work force shortage, which combined with the shortage of capital greatly reduced the number of acres of cotton which could be planted.

Instead of extremely inexpensive slave labour other forms of labour had to be developed. Share cropping and related forms of production were not as efficient as the large scale plantation methods. Also the Share cropping besides being less efficient it was also more expensive.

The number of farms in the south increased from 450,000 to over 1,000,000. The size of the farms decreased from an average of 347 to 156. As the large plantations were more difficult to maintain smaller "yeoman" farmers took over more of the cotton production.

During the Civil war England turned to India, Egypt and Brazil for other sources of Cotton. After the Civil War the South had to compete for market share. It wasn't until 1878 that the South regained its pre Civil War Market Share in Cotton.

Due to the US wanting to prevent any future wars, they passed a series of laws known as the Neutrality Acts (http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/neutrality-acts-0), wherein it would simply make it a lot more difficult to get involved in whatever conflict (thus why the US was referred as a sort of "sleeping giant" before they joined the war).

They later (21st September, 1939) implemented the Cash-Carry policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_carry_(World_War_II)), which ended up replacing the Neutrality Acts. The Cash-Carry allowed for the US to sell supplies to allied nations, only if they came to pick up the supplies themselves (and of course paid in cash).

The Cash-Carry act was then superseded by the Lend-Lease act (enacted in March 11th, 1941), which allowed for the US to sell military supplies to the Allies. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease)

This of course angered Hitler, as Britain could hold out for an extended amount of time (and the looming possibility of the US joining against them), which led him to send the Kriegsmarine (or the German Navy, it is a branch of the Wehrmacht), under Karl Dönitz, and Chief of Navy Erich Raeder (who was replaced by Dönitz in 1943), to the Atlantic (with the famous German U-boats taking center stage, this also led to their nickname as "the wolves of the Atlantic".) In order to then of course attempt to choke out Britain. This was known as the "Battle of the Atlantic", which lasted up until 1945. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic)

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