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"

 Reading Selection– Women–