Chinese American History Curriculum - Immigrant History Initiative - Immigrant History Initiative
Collection of lessons on the Chinese American experience
Building the Railroads · SHEC: Resources for Teachers
This is the whole package - primary & secondary documents, teaching activities, etc.
Child Labor and the Building of America - (Library of Congress)
Students are immersed in primary source materials that relate to child labor in America from 1880-1920 to gain a personal perspective of how work affected the American child within a rapidly growing industrial society. This project is student-driven. Students engage in visual and information literacy exercises to gain expertise in analyzing historical data. Most importantly, students emerge from this experience with a very personal sense that children significantly and heroically affected the building of America.
Popular Music and Race - 1890s vs 1990s
This lesson has students comparing lyrics of African American sheet music of the 1890s and rap music of the 1990s. They can then think about the contextual forces that account for the many similarities.
Exploring U.S. History | a bad rap - lesson plan
This exercise asks you to compare two sets of resources. First, The African American Sheet Music collection at the Library of Congress's American Memory site. Second, the rap lyrics, memorabilia and other material collected on the web by rap fans
Evaluating Eyewitness Reports | EDSITEment
This lesson offers students experience in drawing historical meaning from eyewitness accounts that present a range of different perspectives. Students begin with a case study including alternative reports of a single event: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Students compare two newspaper reports on the fire and two memoirs of the fire written many decades later, with an eye on how these accounts complement and compete with one another, and how these sources can be used to draw historical meaning from them. Students then apply the lessons learned in their investigation of the eyewitness accounts of the Chicago fire by considering a unique eyewitness account: the diary kept by a Confederate girl when her Tennessee town was occupied by Union troops during the Civil War.
Chinese Immigration and Exclusion Lesson Plan
What factors contributed to the Chinese Exclusion Act? (from Stanford History Education Group)
Populism and the Election of 1896
Why did the Populist Party attract millions of supporters? (from Stanford History Education Group)
The Gilded Age | Stanford History Education Group
The Gilded Age unit brings awareness to the turbulant changes that characterized the end of the nineteenth century. Students investigate the rise and fall of the Populist movement, the textbook's account of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the lead-up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the historic labor clashes surrounding Homestead, Haymarket, and Pullman. Three lessons--Populism and the Election of 1896, the Homestead Strike, and the Pullman Strike--help students develop the skill of close reading as they carefully go rthough documents and interpret the author's rhetorical choices.
Immigration in the Gilded Age: Using Photographs as Primary Sources
How successful were photographs in demonstrating the conditions of immigrants during the Gilded Age? (from Gilder Lehrman)
Labor Unions and Working Conditions: United We Stand - (Library of Congress)
Think about your work environment...are you allowed to rest periodically? Do you earn a decent wage? Can you voice your concerns without losing your job? There was a time when workers in the United States did not have basic rights such as a minimum wage or time for a break.
Work with primary source documents from American Memory to study the working conditions of U.S. laborers at the turn of the century. Answer the question, "Was there a need for organized labor unions?"
The Immigrant Experience: Down the Rabbit Hole - (Library of Congress)
In this lesson, students will use class discussions of students' experiences, the first-hand accounts of immigrants, and other primary source documents and images from the collections of the Library of Congress to uncover the common themes of the immigrant experience.
America at the Centennial - (Library of Congress)
This lesson uses images and texts selected from the digital collections of the Library of Congress to engage students in studying the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Its central topic is the question of what items and images of the Exposition said about America. Students examine other images from the era to see the Exposition in the context of its time, and work as historians using primary source images and documents to construct museum exhibits on the issues of the Centennial Era.
Thomas Edison, Electricity, and America - (Library of Congress)
Using documents from the Library of Congress, students investigate electrification as both a technological and social process. A focus of the student's investigation is Thomas Edison.
The Industrial Age in America: Sweatshops, Steel Mills, and Factories | EDSITEment
The Haymarket Affair, Homestead Strike and Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire
Has Industrialization Produced More Benefits or More Problems for the Nation?
Four page homework assignment with background, directions, readings and questions. Excerpts from Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth compared with Henry George.
A Company Town Faces Starvation during the Pullman Strike
When wage cuts prompted Pullman workers to strike in May 1894, out-of-work employees and their families faced starvation. This series of letters documents Pullman citizens' desperate appeals to the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, and Altgeld's unheeded request that Pullman himself help to alleviate the situation.
Thomas Nast, Milk Tickets for Babies, 1876
This could be used for a quick lesson intro or "do now". Michael O'Malley explains how Thomas Nast's 1876 political cartoon lampooning paper money provides an opportunity for students to explore public debate about economic transformations during the Gilded Age.
Irish Immigrant Stereotypes and American Racism
In this essay, Kevin Kenny examines a British political cartoon to raise questions about the transatlantic nature of anti-Irish prejudice and its relationship to the history of racism in America.
Two Photos, Many Stories
Historian William Friedheim uses before and after photographs of Lakota students taken at the Carlisle Indian School to raise issues about Native American identity and assimilation, and demonstrates how examining photographs as primary documents, combined with additional primary sources, shows students how use of evidence creates historical meaning.
Columbus Day, 1892 - not 1492 - Lesson
From "THinking Like an Historian", this 14 page lesson provides teacher background and context along with a complete lesson and resources.
Evaluating Historical Sources on Juana Briones | Stanford History Education Group
Although this document lesson would fit into the chronological sequence in the late 1880s, it can be used earlier in the school year to focus student's differentiation between an historical source's strengths and limitations.
Rise of the Populists and William Jennings Bryan |
Students use primary and secondary sources to analyze the arguments of the populists and the look for similarities between the rhetoric of the 1890s and the 2010s
The Dramas of Haymarket | AHA
This AHA description of a college lesson that takes several classes to complete gives high school teachers a couple options to cherry pick or cut out which element or documents would be most helpful for their classes. The lesson is based on primary source documents organized by the Chicago Historical Society
Introduction | The Great Chicago Fire & The Web of Memory
The Great Chicago Fire & the Web of Memory consists of two main parts. The first part, titled The Great Chicago Fire, includes five chronologically organized sections that together present a history of the fire. The sections of the second part, The Web of Memory, examine six ways in which the fire has been remembered: eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism and illustrations, imaginative forms such as literature and art, the legend of Mrs. O'Leary and her cow, fire souvenirs of many different kinds, and formal commemorations and exhibitions. Each of the sections has three integrated components: thematic galleries of images, a library of texts, and an interpretive essay.