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Objective This lesson is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Through a step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any primary or secondary source material. Overview Over the course of this lesson, students will examine text, context, and subtext, as well as the types of rhetorical devices that Lincoln employed in the Gettysburg Address. The teacher should provide more...

Background Crates full of rice slip and slide across the floorboards as the ship rocks back and forth. The ship looks insignificant in the vastness of the ocean. Air scented with tobacco wafts through the cracks in the ceiling of the hold. A small cry breaks with the crashing of the waves as child treated like another barrel or crate full of cargo wonders about his fate. These are the sights, smells, and sounds of the transatlantic trading routes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Highly profitable triangular trade routes were established between Europe, Africa, and...

Background Wampanoags Much of what is known about early Wampanoag history comes from archaeological evidence, the Wampanoag oral tradition (much of which has been lost), and documents created by seventeenth-century English colonists. The Wampanoag people have lived in southeastern New England for thousands of years. In 1600 there were as many as 12,000 Wampanoag who lived in forty villages. Both oral tradition and archaeological evidence suggest that Indigenous peoples lived in the area for 10,000 years. Wampanoag means “People of the Dawn” in the Algonquian language. There...

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 Pullman Palace Car Company was operating 2,135...

Essential Question To what extent have the conditions of American workers improved over the past 100 years? Background After the Civil War, the United States witnessed an accelerating movement of people westward, a rapidly increasing number of immigrants, and the large growth of urban areas. Along with these trends, the massive changes in how corporations were organized and operated and the growth of the labor movement during this period wrought significant changes in American life. The right to organize, to bargain for wages and working conditions, the equitable distribution...