• analyze and discuss the significance of primary source documents;
• describe the working conditions in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century that gave rise to the labor union movement;
• understand the justification for organized labor unions; and
• present their justification by using the primary source documents from American Memory to defend their arguments.

This lesson meets the following standards:

1. Oregon Standards from the Oregon Department of Education: Social Science - History - U.S. History - Era 6: ; Development of the Industrial U.S. (1870-1900); Progressivism at the local, state, and national levels; emergence of a modern capitalist economy in the 1920s.
2. National Standards for Social Studies:
   • Standard 3: Students should understand the rise of the U.S. labor movement, and how political issues reflected social and economic changes.
   • Standard 3A: Demonstrate how the "second industrial revolution" changed the nature and conditions of work by analyzing how working conditions changed and how the workers responded to deteriorating conditions.
3. ALA Information Literacy Standards:
   • IV. Assessing and comprehending the information.
   • IV-B. Differentiate between primary and secondary sources.
   • IV-J. Identify points of agreement and disagreement among sources.

McREL 4th Edition Standards & Benchmarks

Historical Understanding
Standard 2. Understands the historical perspective

Language Arts
Standard 9. Uses viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret visual media

US History
Standard 18. Understands the rise of the American labor movement and how political issues reflected social and economic changes

• African-American Experience in Ohio
• America Singing: Nineteenth Century Song Sheets
• American Indians of the Pacific Northwest
• An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera
• History of the American West, 1860-1920
• Music for the Nation, 1870-1885
• The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books and Periodicals
• Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
• Washington as It Was, 1923-1959

• Puget Sound area family of hop pickers in field, Washington, ca.1890-1893
• Great Western Sugar
• Interior sugar factory, carbonation station
• Mining. Men and machinery in mine.
• Coal Breaker Boys
• Factory Workers on Assembly Line for Bearings
• Hauling Coal
• Cadillac Motor Car Co. factory workers, assembling engines, possibly Detroit, Michigan
• Kuner Pickle Company
• Interior boiler room, sugar factory, Loveland, Colo.
• Slicing machine, sugar factory, Eaton, Colo.
• Interior warehouse, sugar factory, Loveland, Colo.
• Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. factory no. 12, Clarksburg, West Virginia. Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. factory interior VII

Documents

• Attention workingmen! great mass meeting to-night...
• Senator Sherman on the Pullman Strike [from newspaper]
• Striking Manifestation [from newspaper]
• Fair Wages
• Grand Explosion in One of Our Coal Mines

Sheet Music

• Eight hour strike
• The Factory children's prayer
• The song of the shirt
• The Workers' anvil
• Give our work girls a little more pay