Students will examine the post-Civil War industrial revolution and the diverse peoples who played a role in the Gilded Age. Case studies will include Chinese immigrants, who built the railroads in America, and students will explore the role that railroads played in the growth of large corporations. Students will study the impact that westward conquest had on Native Americans. Students will analyze the choices and dilemmas of individuals of this time by reading and/or hearing testimonials and comparing differing approaches of civil rights activists on achieving progress and equality for African Americans through exploring such writers as Booker T. Washington (Tuskegee Institute) and W.E.B. Du Bois (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – NAACP). They will analyze how Southern and Eastern Europeans were pulled to industrial America for economic, political, and religious reasons between the 1890s and 1910s bringing tens of millions of darker skinned, non-English, non-Protestant migrants. They will study how Asian immigration continued in the West despite laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Land Act of 1913.  The twentieth century migrations led to an increasingly diverse America, overcrowded urban areas, labor organizing and unrest, and opened the door to shifting ideas about gender and race. 

Students can explore both the emergence of, and reaction to, eugenics; racist and anti-miscegenation laws during the Progressive Era. Students will analyze legal statutes and letters of protest, dealing with the concept of race in U.S. society in the early 1900s and understand the role that law played in the construction of both racial identity and overall American identity. Additional voice will be given to child laborers, and factory working standards/conditions, meat production, and muckrakers as well as the advocates for injustice in these areas. Students will also study the growth of various movements (i.e., labor, women’s suffrage, government corruption, education, etc.) and reformers such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), despite the efforts of corporations to use violence against workers. As people flocked to cities, new forms of entertainment and freedom provided space for less restricted forms of intimacy, and same sexed relationships. Finally, students will study the role that diverse peoples have played in technological progress. 

Key Assignments:

1. Students will gather facts, make inferences, generate questions, and evaluate bias and purpose by examining the writings and photographs of Lewis Hines, Lillian Wald, Jacob Riis and others who lived during the Gilded Age to learn about tenement life as experienced by immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Then, they will design a tenement building that includes the ethnicity of inhabitants, plans and adheres to building codes of the time. Students will review each other’s plans, choose a building to live in, and explain why that building would be their choice.

2. Students will conduct online research to locate primary and secondary sources and write a compare-contrast essay to communicate the similarities and differences of various female reformers during the Progressive Era. Students will consider the locations of the various reformers and their ultimate political goals. Through the use of both primary and secondary sources, students will read about how women fought for expanded rights during the Progressive Era and determine how various female reformers were able to produce national reforms through their strategic organizing at the local level. Finally, students will analyze which female reformer they feel made the greatest contribution to the civic principles and social reform movements of the Progressive Era and cite evidence to support their choice.

Paying With Their Health

Unwilling or unable to complain about working conditions, immigrants routinely suffer chronic problems brought about by pesticide use, harsh weather and the lack of proper equipment. In this lesson from Teaching Tolerance, students will read primary sources and learn more about these conditions—from the past and the present.

Essential Questions:

• What are the circumstances under which immigrant laborers work?

• What are the health effects on immigrant farm workers in those circumstances?

• What is the history of the treatment of these workers in the food production industry? How has it changed?

• What is the government doing about the issue?

Literacy:

• Reading 1: Excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

• Reading 2: Chicken—‘Racing With the Machines’

• Reading 3: Isabel

• Policy Recommendations beginning on page 54 of "Injustice On Our Plates", or alternatively, see: https://www.splcenter.org/20101107/injustice-our-plates 

Purpose/Outcomes: Students will be able to...

• Discern similarities and differences using multiple texts, including Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

• Compare the conditions of immigrant laborers in the food production industry during two points in time.

• Draft an outline for a novel based on current workplace environments described in the report.

• Dramatize first-hand accounts of the work lives of undocumented immigrants.

• Evaluate web information on the issue (see "Injustice on Our Plates."