Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and trial

Go beyond the textbook, students!

More than just as tribute to the victims, more than just a disaster story, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire, and the following events including the trial of the company owners, lay out issues you can see clearly.  I think the event is extremely well documented and adapted for projects.  Theses events lay a foundation for understanding the great issues of the time.

A couple of good websites crossed my browser recently, and you should go investigate.

• From Cornell University’s Institute for Labor Relations, a site the features writings of some of the victims, headlines of the times, and several other documents suitable for classroom use or in building a Documents-based Question for an AP class.  Read accounts from survivors of the fire, and stories from some of the victims.  This is a good place to get a feeling for what people thought, then.
• From the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the home of the Douglas Linder’s “Famous Trials” page, the story of the trial of the owners of the company (they were acquitted).  This site is rich in information and images, a real gold mine for in-class slide presentations and student projects.  Just browse it, and it will make you smarter. Spend some serious time looking at, studying and analyzing, the photographs and drawings.

1911 cartoon from a New York paper shows the owners dressed in dollar bills, holding shut the door that barred the safe exit of so many women during the fire. Courtesy UMKC Famous Trials site; New York Evening Journal, March 31, 1911

Events around the fire illuminate so much of American history, and of government (which Texas students take in their senior year):

• Labor issues are obvious to us; the incident provides a dramatic backdrop for the explanation of what unions sought, why workers joined unions, and a sterling example of a company’s clumsy and destructive resistance to resolving the workers’ issues.
• How many Progressive Era principles were advanced as a result of the aftermath of the fire, and the trial?
• Effective municipal government, responsive to voters and public opinion, can be discerned in the actions of the City of New York in new fire codes, and action of other governments is clear in the changes to labor laws that resulted.
• The case provides a dramatic introduction to the workings and, sometimes, misfirings of the justice system.
• With the writings from the Cornell site, students can climb into the events and put themselves on the site, in the courtroom, and in the minds of the people involved.
• Newspaper clippings from the period demonstrate the lurid nature of stories, used to sell newspapers — a working example of yellow journalism.
• Newspapers also provide a glimpse into the workings of the Muckrakers, in the editorial calls for reform.
• Overall, the stories, the photos, the cartoons, demonstrate the workings of the mass culture mechanisms of the time.

Use the sites in good education, and good health.

This post is adapted with permission from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

Review questions for 2nd 6-Weeks’ Test

These questions should give a tight focus on material that will be covered on the 6 Weeks’ exam next week.  If you can answer these well, you should be in good shape to answer the test questions:

1. What is John D. Rockefeller’s Oil Trust famous for?  Why was this considered a problem?
2. What caused people to combine together in labor unions – what were the causes labor unions fought for?
3. Where did most immigrants to the U.S. come from, circa  1870 to 1900?
4. Carrie Nation – who was she?  What tool is a symbol of Carrie Nation?
5. What were the effects of increased and improved mass transit in the early part of the 20^th century, especially intra-city rail lines?
6. How did immigrants who came to the United States from Italy and Russia between 1880 and 1900 contributed to our country’s culture and national identity?
7. Who was Susan B. Anthony, and what were the successes of her cause?
8. What was each of these men famous for?  (John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie)
9. What is stock in a business, and what form of business entity sells stock – and why?
10. What is a monopoly?  What is a business trust?
11. What is the difference between a craft union, and an industrial union?  Who was the great leader of the craft unions.  Who was the great leader of the industrial unions?
12. What was the Haymarket Affair?  Where did it take place?  What about the Homestead Strike?
13. What is Ellis Island famous for?  Where is it?  What national symbol is it next to?
14. What does “urban” mean?  What does “rural” mean?  What is “urbanization?”
15. What is a tenement?
16. What was the “Gilded Age,” about when was it, and how did it get its name?
17. What is the Civil Service Act, and what was it intended to fix?
18. Who was Boss Tweed?  What (is/was) Tammany Hall?  Where was Tammany Hall?
19. Who was Thomas Nast?
20. What were the chief goals of the Progressives, and the Progressive Movement?  Name someone who might be considered a Progressive.  What are:  Recall, Referendum, Initiative, and Rollback?
21. Who was Robert LaFollette?
22. Who was Upton Sinclair, what was The Jungle, and what changes did it cause?
23. Describe each of these amendments briefly:  16^th Amendment, 17^th Amendment,  18^th Amendment, 19^th Amendment, 20^th Amendment, 21^st Amendment
24. What were the Civil War amendments to the Constitution?
25. What sort of disasters did both Chicago and San Francisco experience (though 35 years apart, and by different causes).
26. What are the problems of urbanization?  What problems did cities face as they grew?
27. Who was Jane Addams?  What was the institution she established?  What was that movement called?
28. What did immigrants supply to factory owners, and what role did they play in industrialization?
29. Who was Theodore Roosevelt?  How did he get to be president?
30. Know how to orient a map.
31. Know how to calculate a simple percentage.

On-line help for review materials

You can find on-line help to review material for the 6 Weeks’ Test at the site of the publisher of our text book, McDougall-Littell.

For Chapter 8, “Life at the Turn of the Century”:

• Flipcards, Chapter 8
• Historic Decisions of the Supreme Court (Plessy v. Ferguson)
• Chapter 8 practice quiz

Chapter 9, “The Progressive Era”:

• Flipcards (vocabulary and history), Chapter 9
• Link to more information about the muckrakers
• Chapter 9 practice quiz

Note in comments whether you find these resources useful.

Online practice quizzes, Chapter 7: Immigration and Urbanization

Our text’s publishers have parctice quizzes on line (with other materials).  Try ‘em out.  Here’s Chapter 7, “Immigration and Urbanization.“

Nose around at that site and see what else you can find — is any of it useful to you?

Sputnik’s 52nd anniversary

Encore post from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, 2007:

America woke up on October 4, 1957.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit. After successfully putting the shiny ball into orbit, the Soviets trumpeted the news that Sputnik traced the skies over the entire planet, to the shock of most people in the U.S. (Photo of the model in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.)

New Scientist magazine’s website provides significant details about how awake America became, including very good coverage of the Moon landings that were nearly a direct result of Sputnik’s launch — without Sputnik, the U.S. probably wouldn’t have jump started its own space program so, with the creation of NASA and the drive for manned space flight, and without the space race President John F. Kennedy probably wouldn’t have made his dramatic 1961 proposal to put humans on the Moon inside a decade.

Sputnik really did change the world.

Much of the progress to the 1969 Moon landing could not have occurred without the reform of education and science prompted by the Soviets’ triumph. With apathetic parents and the No Child Left Behind Act vexing U.S. education and educators from both sides, more than nostalgia makes one misty-eyed for the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a direct product of Sputnik-inspired national ambition. Coupled with the GI Bill for veterans of World War II and Korea, NDEA drove U.S. education to be the envy of the world, best in overall achievement (and also drove creationists to try to block such improvements).

(Today NDEA gets little more than a footnote in real history — Wikipedia’s entry is short and frustrating, the U.S. Department of Education gives little more. Educators, you have got to tell your history.)

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) lists 1957 as among the dozen dates students need to know in U.S. history, for Sputnik. It is the only date Texas officials list for U.S. history that is really an accomplishment by another nation. (The first time I encountered this requirement was in a meeting of social studies teachers gearing up for classes starting the following week. The standards mention the years, but not the events; I asked what the event was in 1957 that we were supposed to teach, noting that if it was the Little Rock school integration attempt, there were probably other more memorable events in civil rights. No one mentioned Sputnik. It was more than two weeks before I got confirmation through our district that Sputnik was the historic event intended. Ouch, ouch, ouch!)

Sputnik was big enough news to drive Elvis Presley off the radio, at least briefly, in southern Idaho. My older brothers headed out after dinner to catch a glimpse of the satellite crossing the sky. In those darker times — literally — rural skies offered a couple of meteoroids before anyone spotted Sputnik. But there it was, slowly painting a path across our skies, over the potato fields, over the Snake River, over America.

Sputnik’s launch changed our lives, mostly for the better.

Resources:

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy provides a series of links teachers can rely on for good information, especially if you’re composing a lesson plan quickly.

New Scientist’s broad range of coverage of the space race, up to the current drive to go to Mars, is well worth bookmarking.

Google’s anniversary logo, in use today only, gets you to a good compilation of sources.

Fifty nano-satellites launched in honor of the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.

NASA’s history of the event. You can listen to a .wav recording of the telemetry signal from the satellite there, too.

How will you mark the anniversary?

[More links below the fold.]

More resources:

• Moscow Weekly News on the legacy of Sputnik, viewed from Russia
• YouTube video, Bernard Lovell, then head of Jodrell Bank Telescope, on finding the signal and tracking the satellite (link from Al Jazeera, ironically enough)
• AFP story on anniversary commemorations in Russia
• “Sputnik Sweethearts,” editorial in Hindustan Times on the possibilities for space exploration if nations cooperate rather than compete
• Press release from Science Daily
• Associated Press story on 50th anniversary ceremonies at Star City, the cosmonaut training center outside of Moscow; NASA Chief Administrator Michael Griffin spoke (the Cold War is STILL over!)
• USC education prof Karen Symms Gallagher, “Sputnik Redux: What’s changed for K-12?” in Forbes
• Photos from ABC Television News

Also see at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• “Can we keep up . . . ?“
• “Quote of the moment:  John F. Kennedy, ‘We choose to go to the Moon’”
  

President William McKinley, d. September 14, 1901

“On the Threshold,” illustration from Harper’s Weekly, September 14, 1901

Teachers should be mining the “On This Day” feature at the New York Times, which usually features an historic cartoon or illustration from an antique Harper’s Weekly.  It is a favorite feature, to me.

Yesterday, it featured the illustration from Harper’s upon the death of President William McKinley, on September 14, 1901.

At the Threshold

Artist: William Allen Rogers

---

his post-dated cartoon was published as President William McKinley lay dying from an assassin’s bullet.  He had been shot on September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz (pronounced chol-gosh) at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.  The president died on September 14.  Here, McKinley is led to the Hall of Martyrs by grief-stricken personifications of the North and South.  Between pillars topped by busts of the two previously slain presidents, Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, the angel of death prepares to place a laurel wreath of honor upon McKinley’s head.  (Images related to Garfield’s assassination also showed a reconciled North and South.)

There is much more at the Times site.

Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln, was present when McKinley was shot.  Accounts I have read but not confirmed say that Robert Lincoln had been invited to attend Ford’s Theatre with his father and mother, the night his father was shot.  As a member of President James Garfield’s cabinet, Robert Lincoln had been awaiting Garfield’s arrival at Union Station in Washington, D.C., when Garfield was shot.

And as a visitor in Buffalo, Robert Lincoln had as a matter of respect lined up to shake President William McKinley’s hand.

Astounding if true.  Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated.  Robert Lincoln was present for two of them, and close to the first assassination.  Where can we confirm or deny that story?

McKinley’s death catapulted the do-gooder, Theodore Roosevelt, into the presidency, probably to the great chagrin of corrupt Republican politicians who had hoped that by getting him nominated to the vice presidency they could get him out of New York politics.

The rest is history.

Paul Revere, Lexington and Concord again: 'The shot heard 'round the world'

[Borrowed completely from Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, with permission of the author; from April 2007]

April 19. Does the date have significance? Among other things, it is the date of the firing of the “shot heard ’round the world,” the first shots in the American Revolution. On April 19, 1775, American Minutemen stood to protect arsenals they had created at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, against seizure by the British Army then occupying Boston.

April is National Poetry Month. What have we done to celebrate poetry?

What have we done to properly acknowledge the key events of April 18 and 19, 1775? Happily, poetry helps us out in history studies, or can do.

In contrast to my childhood, when we as students had poems to memorize weekly throughout our curriculum, modern students too often come to my classes seemingly unaware that rhyming and rhythm are used for anything other than celebrating materialist, establishment values obtained sub rosa. Poetry, to them, is mostly rhythm; but certainly not for polite company, and never for learning.

Poems slipped from our national curriculum, dropped away from our national consciousness.

And that is one small part of the reason that Aprils in the past two decades turned instead to memorials to violence, and fear that violence will break out again. We have allowed darker ideas to dominate April, and especially the days around April 19.

You and I have failed to properly commemorate the good, I fear. We have a duty to pass along these cultural icons, as touchstones to understanding America.

So, reclaim the high ground. Reclaim the high cultural ground.

Read a poem today. Plan to be sure to have the commemorative reading of “Paul Revere’s Ride” in your classes next April 18 or 19, and “The Concord Hymn” on April 19.

We must work to be sure our heritage of freedom is remembered, lest we condemn our students, our children and grandchildren to having to relearn these lessons of history, as Santayana warned.

Texts of the poems are below the fold, though you may be much better off to use the links and see those sites, the Paul Revere House, and the Minuteman National Historical Park.

Paul Revere’s Ride

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1860.

LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower, as a signal light, –
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the somber rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade, –
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay, –
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and somber and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock,
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When be came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British regulars fired and fled, –
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, –
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

The Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, –
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

The monument at Concord, the “shaft we raised to them and Thee” in Emerson’s poem. Image from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse clipart collection.

Beware the #1 hoax site on the web

Cross posted with permission from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

This may be the #1 hoax site on the web:  Martinlutherking.org. Certainly it is a site dangerous for children, because it cleverly purports to be an accurate history site, while selling voodoo history and racism.

A racist group bought the domain name (note the “.org” suffix), and they’ve managed to keep it.  The site features a drawing of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the first page.  The racist elements are subtle enough that unwary students and teachers may not recognize it for the hoax site it is.

It is both racist and hoax:  Note the link to a racist argument on “Why the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday should be repealed;”  note the link to a hoax page, “Black invention myths.”

Students, nothing on that site should be trusted. Teachers, warn students away from the site.  You may want to use that site as a model of what a bad site looks like, and the importance of weighing the credibility of any site found on the web.

Why do I even mention the racist, hoax site? Because it comes upi #3 on Google searches for “Martin Luther King.”  Clearly a lot of people are being hoodwinked into going to that site.  I’ve seen papers by high school students citing the site, with teachers unaware of the site’s ignoble provenance.

Update: The site is owned by Stormfront, a white supremicist organization.

Here are a few good sites on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; you can help things by clicking on each one of these sites, and by copying this list with links and posting it on your blog:

• Nobel Foundation site, biography of Dr. King for receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace
• King’s Nobel Prize Lecture
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute (King Institute) at Stanford University
• Lesson plans from the King Institute, on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Letter from Birmingham Jail, and more
• The King Center site; photo and video archive at the King Center
• Tribute, resources and links from the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library at the C. W. Post Campus, Long Island University
• Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

National History Day, June 18, 2009

Oh, gee, we’re running late:  The National History Day competition live webcast is this morning.  Go here: http://www.history.com/classroom/nhd/

And watch this, if you’re too late for the webcast.

Moon Hoax: How do we know what really happened?

This is a rerun of a post from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, originally posted in 2006 – with explicit permission of the author.  For Ms. Luna.

In a classroom discussion of “how do we know what we know” about history, another student brought up the allegations that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) faked the manned Moon landings. That makes about a dozen times this year a kid has mentioned this claim (who thinks to start counting these things?). The kid was pretty unshakable in his convictions — after all, he said, how can a flag wave in a vacuum?

Astronaut from Apollo 14, on the Moon with U.S. flag - NASA photo via Wikimedia

I usually mention a couple of things that the fake claimers leave out — that dozens, if not hundreds, of amateur astronomers tracked the astronauts on their way to the Moon, that many people intercepted the radio transmissions from the Moon, that one mission retrieved debris from an earlier unmanned landing, etc. Younger students who lack experience in serious critical thinking have difficulty with these concepts. They also lack the historic background — the last manned Moon landing occurred when their parents were kids, perhaps. They didn’t grow up with NASA launches on television, and the whole world holding its breath to see what wonders would be found in space.

Phil Plait runs a fine blog called Bad Astronomy. Five years ago he got fed up with the Fox Television program claiming the Moon landings were hoaxes, and he made a significant reply that should be in some hall of fame for debunking hoaxes. Since the claim that the Moon landings were hoaxes is, itself, a hoax, I have titled this “Debunking the Moon landing hoax hoax.”

In any case, if you’re wondering about whether the Moon landings were hoaxes, you need to see Phil Plait’s post. Phil writes:

From the very first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took four pages of notes. I won’t subject you to all of that here; it would take hours to write. I’ll only go over some of the major points of the show, and explain briefly why they are wrong.

Also, consider these chunks of evidence, which Phil does not mention so far as I know:

First, the first Moon landing left a mirror on the surface, off of which Earth-bound astronomers may bounce laser transmissions in order to measure exactly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The American Institute of Physics has radio stories about the research results. Those who claim the landings were hoaxes have never been able to explain this mirror to my satisfaction — ask them how it got there if it wasn’t delivered by Apollo astronauts.

Second, Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved parts of the unmanned lunar probe Surveyor 3, which had landed on the Moon in 1967. That would be impractical to fake. It’s possible, I suppose, that someone could have conceived of the hoax a decade before it was necessary, and made a duplicate probe — but it defies all logic and history to claim that NASA undertook Surveyor 3 solely to provide physical evidence to claim a lunar landing that didn’t happen. A simpler explanation is that the Apollo 12 astronauts really landed and really retrieved the parts from Surveyor 3. A side note: My recollection is that a mold was found inside a camera recovered, indicating that molds can survive trips through the vacuum of space, and the temperature extremes for at least three years on the Moon. I’m not sure a hoax inventor could have conceived of that little bit — it’s too fantastic, and as Twain noted, in fiction one must stick to the possibilities.

NASA itself has a fine article debunking the hoax claims.

Jim Scotti’s site refutes the claims of hoax.

Photo above from Apollo 14, Alan Shepard’s “golf shot” trip.