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Showing results 21 – 26 of 26

Glossary Term – Person

Emmett Till

Emmett Till (1941–1955) was a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago who was brutally murdered in rural Mississippi in 1955. Till was in Mississippi to visit relatives, and on August 24, 1955, he spoke to or whistled at a female grocery store cashier. Four days later the woman’s husband and his half brother abducted Till and beat him severely before shooting him and dumping his body into a river. The murderers were quickly arrested, but they were acquitted at trial by an all-white, all-male jury.

Glossary Term – Place

Chicago

During the Great Migration, Chicago became a major destination for African Americans migrating from the South. The city’s industrial expansion made it attractive to job seekers, and Chicago’s Southside in particular became an important black enclave as African Americans took up residence in the neighborhood to work in meatpacking jobs and steel mills.

Teaching Resource

George Pullman: His Impact on the Railroad Industry, Labor, and American Life in the Nineteenth Century

Background

George Mortimer Pullman was an influential industrialist of the nineteenth century and the founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company. His innovations brought comfort and luxury to railroad travel in the 1800s with the introduction of sleeping cars, dining cars, and parlor cars. Like other industrialists of the period Pullman built a company town near his factory to accommodate his workers’ housing needs. He advertised it as a model community which offered his workers modern amenities in a beautiful setting. By 1890, the...

Teaching Resource

The 1919 Black Sox Scandal

  Introduction

Baseball became an increasingly integral part of the American landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Growth of the sport occurred in conjunction with the rapid industrialization of the United States, the rise of big business, the expansion of the working class, frequent disputes over labor practices and the Progressive reform era, which sought ways to address the challenges of a modern America.

Professional baseball in many ways...

Teaching Resource

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871: A Story of Human Tragedy and Triumph

Background

Ask anyone what the greatest disaster in Chicago was and probably no one will say, “The Great Iroquois Theatre Fire of December 30, 1903.” Six hundred three souls perished in that fire. They probably won’t say, “The sinking of the Eastland excursion boat in the Chicago river in 1915.” Eight hundred thirty-five died in that tragedy. The answer will most likely be, “The Great Chicago Fire.” The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 left approximately three and one-third square miles of the city in ruin, created $192,000,000 in...

Teaching Resource

The Haymarket Riot: A Common Core Unit

Unit Objective

This lesson on the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago based on a Chicago Herald article is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core–based units. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Students will demonstrate this knowledge by writing summaries of selections from the original document and, by the end of the unit, articulating their understanding of the complete document by answering questions in an argumentative...