Primary Source Toolbox
Standford History Education Group:
This source contains information about events pertaining to a specific time period. The two topics from the website that relates to this unit are titled, The Gilded Age and Progressiveism. This source contains primary sources such as worker's strikes, settlement houses and women's suffrage.
http://sheg.stanford.edu/albert-parsons
The Library of Congress:
This primary source archive contains pictures of children working during the Industrial Revolution from the National Child Labor Committee Collection. It contains pictures in different parts of the U.S. such as factories, farms and in the cities, showing different jobs children worked in.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/arrangement.html
The Smithsonian Source:
This source contains a collections of accounts of workers discussing their factory life and strikes. Excerpts can be found by searching the time period, for this unit there are testimonies before congress about the workers' conditions and when children started working.
http://www.smithsoniansource.org/display/primarysource/results.aspx?&pId=2
The National Archives:
This website contains different primary sources on the inventions of that time period, documentation (photographs) of child labor and political cartoons on progressivism.
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/industrial-us.html
Cornell University:
This website was created to remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. There are letters, pictures, music, reports, interviews about sweatshops and the fire in which many lost their lives.
http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/
Lessons Utilizing Primary Sources
DocsTeach Activities:
Finding a sequence activity: This activity was created in order to help students understand the sequence or order of events. In this case the activity I have attached below is to help students understand the quality of food, the business practices, as well as what was acceptable, before and after the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The sequencing activity allows students to analyze different documents, to put them in order as a way to assess if students can identify the differences before and after.
http://docsteach.org/activities/4634/detail?mode=browse&menu=closed&era%5B%5D=the-emergence-of-modern-america&sortBy=title
Making Connections: This activity was created to help the students understand the connections between events, decisions and documents. It allows students to analyze documents that were influential at the time. The activity provides guided questions before the documents are introduced to the story to help them focus on the main connection or the big picture. The example below is on the Zimmerman Telegraph which was a document that was the spark driving the U.S. into war. The activity uses this document to help students understand the implications of that document on the U.S.
http://docsteach.org/activities/14716/detail?mode=browse&menu=closed&era%5B%5D=the-emergence-of-modern-america&sortBy=title&page=2
http://docsteach.org/activities/4634/detail?mode=browse&menu=closed&era%5B%5D=the-emergence-of-modern-america&sortBy=title
Making Connections: This activity was created to help the students understand the connections between events, decisions and documents. It allows students to analyze documents that were influential at the time. The activity provides guided questions before the documents are introduced to the story to help them focus on the main connection or the big picture. The example below is on the Zimmerman Telegraph which was a document that was the spark driving the U.S. into war. The activity uses this document to help students understand the implications of that document on the U.S.
http://docsteach.org/activities/14716/detail?mode=browse&menu=closed&era%5B%5D=the-emergence-of-modern-america&sortBy=title&page=2