Instructions:
Please chose ONE question to answer.
Your Commentary must have a minimum length of 250 words. Incorporate the authors and/or truncated titles of your two selected primary source documents into the text of your Commentary. Remember, your Commentary is NOT a review, rephrasing, or regurgitation of the selected primary sources but your attempt to find the underlying or "hidden" or "behind the scene" meaning of at least one selected Major Theme and the two selected primary source documents. In other words, what is the moral of the story?
QUESTION #1: Can you tell from the selected primary sources if women generally preferred to be at home or in the workforce and if in the latter, then they wanted union protection?
QUESTION #2: Select any two primary source documents. What do you think of the two primary source documents? What are the specific themes or ideas in the two primary source documents that illustrate one or more signficant historical trends, historical themes, or historical points that are in the Lesson lecture? Base your thoughts on your two selected primary source documents and the lesson lecture, and feel free to add any of your thoughts comparing any time within 1865-1896 to twenty-first- century America.
QUESTION #3: Can you tell from the selected primary sources if industrialists and other employers generally wanted to be good to their employees, but they cannot do so most, if not all, of the time because of the volatile nature of industrial competitors and of the American economy during the Industrial Revolution?
Use only these primary sources:
PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS FOR LESSON 07
Reading Selection-- African Americans--• "A Georgia Sharecropper's Story of Forced Labor ca. 1900"
Reading Selection-- Agrarians--• "In Defense of Home and Hearth: Mary Lease Raises Hell Among the Farmers"
Reading Selection-- Asian Americans--• "A Clear and Present Danger: The Chinese Exclusion Act"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "The Greatest Tyrant in the State of Pennsylvania": A Late
Nineteenth-Century Rail Worker Describes Management by Joseph P. Cahill
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "'I Will Kill Frick': Emma Goldman Recounts the Attempt to
Assassinate the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company During the Homestead Strike in 1892, by Emma Goldman"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "Introducing New Recruits to 'Labor's Catechism'"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "A Labor Newspaper Derides the Myth of the Self-Made Man"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Workers Protest Carnegie Library"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "A Mule Spinner Tells the U.S. Senate about Late 19th century Unemployment"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "Pilgrims' Progress: A Seventeenth-Century Solution to the Nineteenth-Century Conflict between Labor and Capital"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "'The Poisonous Occupations in Illinois': Physician Alice Hamilton Explores the 'Dangerous Trades' at the Turn of the Century by Alice Hamilton"
Reading Selection-- Class Conflict--• "Telling Secrets Out of School: Siringo on the Pinkertons"
Reading Selection-- Corporate Management--• "Marshall Kirkman Dissects the Science of Railroads"
Reading Selection-- Economic Policy--• "Yale Professor William Graham Sumner Prescribes Laissez-Faire for Depression Woes"
Reading Selection-- European Americans--• "Home Sweet Home: Building and Loan Associations Lend a Hand"
Reading Selection-- European Americans--• "Six Families Budget Their Money, 1884"
Reading Selection-- Labor Movement--• "Race and Racism at the 1886 Knights of Labor Convention"
Reading Selection-- Women--• "Women as Bread Winners-The Error of the Age" (An A.F.L. View of Women Workers in Industry, 1897) [No URL. Transcribed from Eileen Boris and Nelson Lichtenstein, Major Problems in the History of American Workers 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 203.]
Reading Selection-- Women--• "A Mormon Woman's Life in Southern Utah"
Reading Selection-- Women--• "A Woman Recounts Her Twelve Abortions in Turn-of- the-Century New York"
Reading Selection-- Women--• "A Woman's Work: Mary Lease Celebrates Women Populists"
Reading Selection-- Women--• "The Working Girls of Boston".