As a historian, I want to help students learn how to use primary sources, the "raw material" of history. These materials can make history more engaging and "real" to students, who are accustomed to getting their history pre-digested from textbooks. The process of using primary sources can also help students develop historical thinking skills, the ability to examine evidence, weigh its implications, draw conclusions, and build larger interpretations. Developing these complex thinking skills is a crucial goal for my classes.
In the mid-1990s, many prominent historical libraries and archival collections began making their materials available to the public on the web. From the Library of Congress and the National Archives to the Schomburg Collection in Black Culture, a treasure trove of historical documents became available. I have been using these online primary materials for many years, and they are an important element in all of my classes.
I used slightly different versions of the following unit in my US History II courses, as well as in my section of the Liberal Arts Capstone Seminar, LIB 200. My experimental variation on the LIB 200 themes of humanism, science and technology was focused on the history of New York City in the 20th century, and was subtitled Going Places: Immigration, Education and Change in NYC, 1900-2002. In both courses, I focused a significant part of the class on the experience of early 20th century immigrants, who confronted a rapidly changing society, reshaped by forces of technology, economics, politics, and culture.
The unit that follows incorporated many different sources, including readings from Who Built America? Volume 2: From 1877 to Present, Nancy Foner's From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration and Anzia Yzeierska's classic novel, The Breadgivers. I also showed Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City, a documentary film that I helped to produce in the early 1990s. The film traces the experiences of two young immigrant women who lived on the Lower East Side, worked in the shirtwaist industry, and took part in a landmark 1909 strike, the Uprising of the 20,000.
After students saw the film, I divided them into three groups for three different followup activities, each designed to help deepen their understanding of one of the issues presented in the film. These three parallel activities, which occur simultaneously in the classroom, illuminate different facets of this fascinating historical moment:
While different in many ways, all three share some common characteristics. Each activity asks students to engage with a set of primary documents, accessed through the web. Each activity asks students to weigh conflicting evidence and perspectives, and to think about the ways history is experienced differently, depending on one's point of view. And each activity leads from research to problem-solving, completing a task where students must themselves adopt a perspective and perform their understanding, whether in writing or in oral form.
I've used different versions of this activity many times, and my experiences have almost always been very positive. The film is highly engaging, and together with the readings, creates great interest in the period - as does the fact that LaGuardia students can relate to many aspects of the immigrant experience of the early 1900s. The tasks are related to dramatic issues, and they ask students to use the knowledge they are creating to perform difficult but engaging cognitive tasks of synthesis, evaluation, and judgment. The tasks are not easy, but group work allows students to help each other complete it effectively. Later in the course, when students are asked to compare the lives of contemporary immigrants to the lives of immigrants of the 1900s, they often refer back to the insights they gained through this film and these activities.
Activity Overview
After reading a set of background materials and seeing the film Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, students are divided into three groups, each of which does a different activity. Group I should have no more than eight students. The other groups can work effectively with larger numbers. See the Materials and Resources section for detailed instructions and materials for each of the activities summarized below.
Activity I: The Struggle Over the Pay Envelope
A role play activity asks this group of students to draw on oral histories and other first person accounts to think about what it meant to young immigrant women to take jobs and make money. Did they contribute that money to support their families or use it to support their own desire for independence?
Activity II: Taking an Editorial Stand
After reading newspaper accounts of the 1909 strike, this group of students constituted themselves as a group of New York Times editors assigned a task of writing an editorial on the meaning of the strike. They have to decide on what position the Times would take, outline the points the editorial would make, and create a rough draft of the editorial.
Activity III: Telling the Story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Less than two years after the strike, one of the biggest shirtwaist sweatshops in the city was swept by a terrible fire, killing 142 people. Many of those who were killed had been active in the strike. After the tragic fire, the union joined forces with Progressive reformers to win passage of new laws that improved (at least somewhat) the health and safety conditions in New York workplaces. This activity asks students to use primary resources made available by Cornell University to study the Triangle Fire, and then to write short narratives from the point of view of someone from the time-a worker or boss who survived, a family member, a union activist, or other observers.
Materials and Resources
Instructions and Materials for Activity I: Struggling Over the Pay Envelope - Role Play
The Situation: Many working class immigrant families on New York City's Lower East Side experienced conflict over whether daughters should turn over their wage envelopes unopened to their mothers. Using the Heaven materials, background reading (drawn from Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars by Elizabeth Ewen), and oral history resources available on the web, the group will develop a role play in which a daughter tells her mother that she will no longer turn over her entire paycheck.
Choosing & Researching Your Character (20-25 min): Meet with your group to very quickly divide into two sub-groups: one group will play Angelina, the daughter of an Italian immigrant family living on the Lower East Side in the 1900s. The other group will play Maria, the mother in this family. In the role play, Angelina and her mother will contend over the proper use of Angelina's paycheck.
After quickly dividing into these character groups, the members of each character group should review the instructions and use the web to review the background resources listed below, gathering information that will help you flesh out the character and prepare.
Excerpt from Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars by Elizabeth Ewen http://www.laguardia.edu/ctl/dfl/sampler/pdf/beynon/ewen.pdf
"Days & Dreams," the testimony of Sadie Frowne, from The Independent, 1902 http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/texts/stein_ootss/ootss_sf.html?location=Sweatshops+and+Strikes
Oral History with Pauline Newman http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/heaven/newman.html
You may also want to review your Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl Viewer Guide (esp. "The World They Came From," "Life in the 'Hood," & "Cheap Amusements"). This material is also available on the web at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/heaven/story.html
Preparing Your Character (5-10 min): Meet with your sub-group to prepare one volunteer to represent the sub-group in the confrontation between mother and daughter. Draw on the background materials, the video, and your own knowledge to prepare your representative. Think carefully about the arguments your character would use and how she would counter the arguments of the opposing family member.
The Debate (10 min): The two sub-groups meet and perform the role play. Angelina, the daughter,
speaks first, explaining why she wants to withhold all or part of her paycheck. Then Maria, her mother,
responds. Give and take follows. (If a character gets stuck, members of her sub-group should help with suggestions.)
Debriefing (10 min): When the characters have explored the issues thoroughly, take a few minutes to talk as a whole group about the issues involved. You might think about these questions in your discussion:
- What happened in the debate? Did one character win? Why? Why did mother and daughter see the issues so differently?
- Would the discussion have been different if the mother and daughter had been Jewish immigrants? How? How would it change things if one or both of the characters were male?
- Do discussions like this take place today? How are they similar? How are they different? What would be the outcome of such a discussion today?
Before you return to the class as a whole, make sure that someone from the group is prepared to make a brief (three to four minutes) report to the class about a) what your group did, and b) the most interesting things that came up during your discussion.
Instructions and Materials for Activity II: Taking an Editorial Stand
The Situation: It is February 18, 1910. The "Uprising of the 20,000," a garment worker's strike that has convulsed New York City, has just ended. You and your group are reporters who have been covering the strike for The New York Times; now you are preparing an issue that will include a retrospective and an editorial on the strike.
Documenting the Strike (25 min) Meet very briefly with your group to select partners to work with on your research. Then, working with your partner, select and review three to five resources from the following list to gather information and insights that will allow you to shape the Times retrospective coverage.
Sample Newspaper Coverage of the Strike from 1909 http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/ctl/dfl/sampler/pdf/beynon/sample.pdf
The Chronology of the Strike from The Triangle Strike & Fire, by Professor John McClymer, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998 http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/ctl/dfl/sampler/pdf/beynon/chronology.pdf
Mary Brown Sumner's portrait of Clara Lemlich in "The Spirit of the Strikers" from The Survey, 1910. http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/ctl/dfl/sampler/pdf/beynon/sumner.pdf
The Rules for Pickets, from a circular issued by the Ladies' Shirtwaist Makers Union http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/ctl/dfl/sampler/pdf/beynon/rules.pdf
You may also want to review your Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl Viewer Guide (esp. "The Rag Trade," and "The Uprising of the 20,000.") http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/heaven/story.html
Optional (if time allows): "Women & Social Movements: Workers & Allies in the NYC Shirtwaist Strike, 1909-1910" http://womhist.binghamton.edu/shirt/doclist.htm especially Doc. 2, 4, 5, 7, 13, or 14.
As you read, take notes on what you find. Think about the key issues of the strike and the coverage it drew from different newspapers. How did different newspapers portray strikers? What can you tell about their attitudes towards immigrants? Towards women? What can you tell about the attitudes of the Times?
Planning Your Newspaper (20 min): Reconvene with your group to share your research and discuss the Times retrospective you would design. Draw on the video, your research, and your own prior knowledge to brainstorm a list of the articles for this issue of the Times. What points of view would the Times of 1910 belikely to include? What points of view might the Times leave out? Finally, try to reach a consensus on yourgroup's recommendation to the paper about the main points of its final editorial position on the strike.
Writing Up An Outline (25 min): Break into teams of two or three reporters to write up a sketch or outline in the Taking An Editorial Stand discussion area in Blackboard, based on your research and discussion. Use this structure to guide your writing:
- One team should sketch the main points to be included in an editorial, and why they are important.
- One or two teams could write up a list of the kinds of articles that would be included in the retrospective, providing a bit of information about what each article might say.
- One team could work individually, reflecting and writing about how the media covered the events of 1909-10. How did the fact that the strikers were women and immigrants shape the coverage? What struck you about the way strikers were described in different newspapers? How might the media cover the same type of events today?
When you're done with your own writing, you might want to read and supplement the writing of other members of your group.
Instructions and Materials for Group III: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
The Situation: On March 25, 1911, a catastrophic fire swept the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in lower Manhattan. Nearly 150 workers-most of them young immigrant women, some only teenagers-died in the fire. Outrage over the tragedy moved the city. How did this fire start? Whose fault was it? How did different groups and individuals understand it at the time? What kind of impact did it have on American history?
Step 1. Reading/Research (20 min): Choose a partner and a work station, and briefly review all of the instructions for this activity. Then, working with your partner, explore the Cornell University website on the Triangle Fire (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/narrative1.html). Start by reading the Introduction, then explore the site, reviewing the press accounts, oral histories, photographs and political cartoons. Bear in mind the writing you will do (see Step 2 below), as well as these questions:
- When did this tragedy occur?
- How was it possible? Why was it possible?
- What were the responses to this tragedy? Why did these responses occur at this time?
- What factors contributed to the responses?
Step 2. Individual Writing (10-15 min): Working as an individual, outline or draft an account of the tragedy from a personal perspective. Draw on the information you gathered from the website as well as the background provided by the Heaven video and our broader discussion. You may choose from the following perspectives, or create one of your own:
- The owner of the Triangle factory, or a different garment factory
- A survivor of the fire, or the parent of a fire victim
- A trade union organizer
- A women's suffrage organizer
- A Tammany Hall politician
- A modern social historian
Step 3. Small Group Discussion (20-25 min): Gather with others who did this activity. Take turns briefly sharing one of your sketches. As you talk, consider the range of responses to this tragedy. How were these responses similar and different? Why did these responses occur at this time? What impact did the Triangle Fire and the outrage it generated have on NYC history?
At the end of this time, prepare one member of the group to share some of your thoughts with the larger group.