In this unit, you’re examining changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, such as the rise of the proletariat class. This activity will introduce you to some economic theories that gained popular support amid industrial transformations in the late nineteenth century. The simulation will help you make foundational comparisons between economic systems.

Causation, comparison
You’ll be drawing comparisons between the principles and practices of economic systems. While considering the benefits and drawbacks of each system from the point of view of different groups in society, you’ll also be establishing causes for socialist-inspired reform movements and socialist revolutions.

In this activity, you will play two separate rounds of rock-paper-scissors. This quick simulation should help you reflect on principles of equity and fairness, as well as help you understand capitalism and socialism.

Round 1

You’re going to play rock-paper-scissors. Your teacher is going to give you some treats to use as part of the game (don’t eat them until your teacher tells you to!), and for each game you lose, you have to give your competitor one of your treats. If you win, you can collect one treat. However, if you run out of treats, you have to sit down. Start by pairing up with someone in your class and continue to play until your teacher tells you to stop.

Once time is up, as a class, tally how many of you ended up with lower, middle, and upper ranges of treats. Now, turn your treats into your teacher, take a couple of minutes to reflect, and answer the Round 1 questions on the Economic Systems Simulation Worksheet.

Round 2

Your teacher will redistribute the treats. This round, you can choose to keep your treats and have them later, or, you can play another round of the game and try to get more. Your teacher will start the timer, and once time is up, again tally how many in the class ended up with lower, middle, and upper ranges of treats, including anyone who chose not to play. Then, answer the Round 2 reflection questions on the worksheet. Be ready to discuss your answers with the class.

After you’ve had a class discussion, complete all of Part 3 of the worksheet. Again, be prepared to discuss your responses with the class. Make sure to ask questions if you are at all confused about the differences between capitalism and socialism, but by now, you’ve probably figured it all out! Your teacher will collect your worksheet to review your answers.

Capitalism and socialism are the two principal economic theories—and systems—that operate in our world today. In this video, John Green describes how they came into being and what principles that are important to each system.

This video is a review of capitalism, but you will learn a few new ideas and make some new connections. More importantly, it will introduce you to socialism, an economic system that we have been hinting at but haven’t really explored until now. These two systems will form the backdrop for our exploration of production and distribution for the rest of this course, so you should learn them well now! (That means that this information will help you to evaluate the production and distribution frame narrative for this course).

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you want the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. How, according to John Green, did industrial capitalism change production?
2. What are some features of capitalism as a cultural system, according to John Green?
3. What were some short-comings of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century?
4. Where did socialism begin as an “intellectual construct”, according to John Green?
5. What did revolutionary socialist Auguste Blanqui believe?
6. What were Karl Marx’s main arguments as presented in this video?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. John Green says that Karl Marx raises the question of whether capitalism is natural and good, or whether we need to check and control it for our own well-being. What kind of evidence would we use to answer that question for our own society?

The long nineteenth century saw the decline of some exploitative labor systems. Serfdom, slavery, and indentured servitude gradually diminished—not everywhere, and not rapidly, but overall. In their place, industrialization and capitalism created a class of workers who were paid wages for their labor. Was this an improvement? How did these workers experience the new economy, and how did they react? Those are the questions we look at in this article.

This article will help you respond to the Unit Problem by introducing the rise of the proletariat as one of the key transformations in the ways people lived and worked during the long nineteenth century. It will also help you think more critically about the impact of industrialization as the most important change within the production and distribution frame narrative for this era.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to the article, industrialists owned the means of production under industrial capitalism. What are the means of production, and how did controlling them make industrialists powerful?
2. Why did industrialists begin to hire women, and what were their experiences?
3. What were conditions like for workers overall?
4. What is the proletariat?
5. How, according to the author, did workers begin to organize into alliances like unions, and what were their principal tactics?
6. Why, according to the author, was there less union organizing in the colonies?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. Does the author of this article seem more sympathetic towards workers or towards industrialists? Do you think their sympathies change how you understand this article?
2. This article defines and describes the proletariat class. Looking around your world today, do you think there is still a proletariat? If so, has it changed at all since the nineteenth century? How?

In this unit, you will learn about how industrialization impacted different groups in society. This activity will allow you to experience a particular role through a manufacturing simulation. By doing so, you will develop an understanding and appreciation of both the positive and negative effects of industrialization (and specifically factory work) depending on your job and social class.

In this activity, you’re going to make greeting cards in an assembly line. Before getting started, watch a clip of assembly line production, such as this one from I Love Lucy, or you might look for the slightly more up-to-date Drake and Josh episode, “I Love Sushi.”

Once you’ve watched the clip, your teacher will assign you a role within a factory and will give you the opportunity to practice making one greeting card before starting. Once you’re ready, there will be three rounds of card making. Start by imagining the following:

The year is 1845 and you’ve moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, where there are a number of factories. Each factory pays about the same amount to its workers (about 37 cents per day) for a 13-hour shift with 2 breaks (30-minutes each) per day. But your pay can be docked for cards that do not meet quality control protocols. So, the more you mess up, the less pay you and your team will earn. Note that each card takes about 2 cents to make, and they are sold to the store owners for 4 cents, for a profit of 2 cents a card.

Round 1

You will have 4 minutes to complete as many cards as you can. Your group’s supervisor will check to see that the cards are completed successfully, and the factory owner is free to “encourage” you to work faster. After the 4 minutes are up, your group’s recorder will tally the results (the number of cards that were successfully completed). Then, the cards will be delivered to the store owners, and they will decide how many more they want and from which factory.

Before moving into Round 2, the factory owner and recorder should tally their profits from Round 1.

Round 2

The factory owners are excited about the orders, but the profit margins are low, so the assembly line workers need to move faster this time. For this round, the workers will only have 3 minutes to fill the order, with the supervisor and factory owner ensuring efficient work. The factory owner and supervisor may decide to create rules for their workers, such as no talking while they’re working. Once again, results will be tallied by the recorder, and products delivered. The store owners can choose whether to stick with one factory or another and whether or not to place another order. The recorders should share how much they made after Round 2, and see how this compares to other groups.

Round 3

The factory owner needs more money—they want to build a new house. This time, workers will only have 2 minutes to fill the order, with the supervisor and factory owner ensuring efficient work. The supervisor and factory owner can create even more rules for their workers for this round. Once they’re done, results will be tallied and products delivered. Recorders should calculate final profits.

Finish the activity with a class discussion:

• What did you experience during the simulation?
• Did you have positive emotions, negative emotions, or both?
• Was there anything particularly difficult or easy about this simulation?
• How do you think the workers of the Industrial Revolution felt about being on the assembly line?
• Why do you think business owners used this method of production?
• If you had a production business, would you use an assembly line? If not, what else could you do?

Living and working conditions were not good for most of the industrial working class. Homes were crowded and unsanitary, factories were dangerous, disease spread in packed cities, and children received little or no education. Reformers tried to improve these conditions by urging changes to laws and policy. Often, improvements were slow, but they laid the groundwork for later twentieth-century movements that had greater success.

This article connects the rise of the proletariat that you learned about in earlier articles to the conditions in which they lived and worked. It also explains the development of reformers who helped to improve these conditions. Together, this information should help you to respond to the Unit Problem: “How did industrialization transform societies around the world?”

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What inspired different groups of social reformers beginning in the United States and Britain, in the long nineteenth century?
2. How did Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s experiences as abolitionists lead them to become advocates for the rights of women?
3. What were some important outcomes of the investigation into the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company?
4. What did Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle reveal to many Americans, and what was one result of their outcry?
5. Jacob Riis wrote about terrible conditions in New York’s Tenements. To what reforms did his book contribute?
6. Stephen Smith connected unsanitary conditions to the spread of typhus and cholera. What kinds of reforms resulted from work like his?
7. What kinds of reforms, across this period, affected children’s lives in particular?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. This article identifies the United States (and in particular New York City) and Great Britain as centers for this type of social reforming in the long nineteenth century. Why do you think people living in these places often led reform movements?

Ottilie Baader was the daughter of a factory worker. She received a few years of schooling, but she spent the majority of her life as an industrial worker. Her experiences inspired her to use her education to become a leader of labor reform movements.

Ottilie Baader’s biography provides unique insights into the life of a factory worker, giving you some perspective to frame your thinking about the Unit 5 Problem: How did industrialization transform societies around the world?By using the production and distribution frame, you will be able to think critically about the impacts of the Industrial Revolution on smaller and larger scales.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. When was Ottilie Baader born, and how old was she when she began school? What did she learn there?
2. When did Ottilie begin working, and why? What were her days like at that age?
3. What was Ottilie’s job in the wool factory like?
4. Why did Ottilie become a labor organizer around 1871?
5. How does the artist use design to depict Baader’s life as a factory worker, but also her attempt to change her condition?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. What evidence does Ottilie Baader’s story provide about industrialization as an engine of change in people’s lives?
2. How does it support, extend, or challenge what you have already learned about the impact of the Industrial Revolution?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

The abolition of slavery around the world took almost two centuries. In this article, Dr. Kym Morrison explores some of the key moments in this process. Abolition was a big deal, freeing millions from legal bondage. But in many post-abolition societies, those in power found new ways to repress and exploit the formerly enslaved. This legacy of racism and slavery continues to reverberate in our world today.

The institution of slavery on a racist model was central to the creation of the modern world. Beginning in the eighteenth century, movements for abolition brought about an end to legal slavery in many places. Did the abolition of slavery end systems of racism? This article provides you with evidence to help answer this question.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Where was the first large-scale post-abolition society created and how did it come about?
2. When the British abolished slavery in their Caribbean colonies, to whom did the government pay compensation?
3. How did societies in the British Caribbean continue to repress formerly enslaved people?
4. After abolition in the US, how did the government treat African Americans? How was inequality enforced?
5. Why did European companies abolish slavery in their African colonies?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. How does this article support, extend, or challenge the narratives you have already studied about reform movements in the long nineteenth century?
2. Can you think of any ways in which your own society is still impacted by the history reviewed in this article? What are they?

Harriet Forten Purvis (1810 – 1875) was an African-American women of mixed heritage. She was one of the organizers of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and later an activist for women’s suffrage. Along with her sisters, her husband, and allies, she pioneered strategies that would be used by later civil rights movements. She has received little credit for her work.

How did transformations like the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women come about? Who made these reforms happen, and how were they connected? You have read some high-level articles on this subject. The biography of Harriet Forten Purvis provides evidence from an individual’s life to help you to answer these questions.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What was Harriet Forten Purvis’ family and community like as a child?
2. What was the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery society, and what happened when they organized a national conference in 1838?
3. How else did Purvis and her husband fight against slavery and discrimination?
4. What other reform movement did Purvis work for, and what were the results of their struggle?
5. The first letter of Purvis’ name in the title is formed by two women, one African-American, one white, holding hands. These same women are shown in the last panel, but separated. What is the artist trying to tell us?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. How does this biography of Harriet Forten Purvis support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about social transformations and their limits during the long nineteenth century?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

Although it took a while, the abolition (ending) of slavery in the Atlantic world, and then more widely, was a major transformation in labor. Why did it happen? Was it because capitalism made slavery inefficient and obsolete? Was it because of a shift in cultural values in European and Euro-American societies? Or was it because of the actions of enslaved people themselves?

Abolition is one of the transformations in the ways people lived and worked that you will explore in the Unit Problem. This article will help you to explore why that change happened. In doing so, it will help you to connect abolition to other transformations during the long nineteenth century. This article will also help you to tie abolition to the communities, networks, and production and distribution frame in order to help you evaluate the narratives in those frames.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to the article, which countries in the Atlantic abolished the slave trade early? Which countries abolished slavery early? Which countries abolished it late?
2. How might capitalism have helped end slavery? How did this connect to production and distribution during the Industrial Revolution?
3. How might changing morality helped end slavery? How did this connect to the transformations in human communities caused by the Enlightenment and changes in religious and political communities?
4. How might networks of Africans and descendants of Africans have helped end slavery?
5. Does the author argue that slavery actually ended when it became illegal?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. In the previous unit, you learned about political revolutions. In this unit, you learned about industrialization and its impacts. This article presents you with political, economic, and reform arguments for why slavery ended. Based on what you've learned, which argument seems most convincing and why? Which is least convincing and why?

In this activity, you’ll continue to develop your sourcing skills by analyzing a set of primary and secondary source excerpts related to three theories about why slavery was abolished. This will help you understand that historians often have different explanations for historical events and processes. Therefore, by looking at one event from multiple angles, you’ll begin to see why sourcing is an important skill to help you analyze these events. In addition, you’ll develop an answer to the question of why slavery was abolished by evaluating each source’s point of view and purpose for writing, as well as the historical context in which the source was written. This will help you refine your sourcing skills and more fully understand why examining numerous historical texts is necessary when attempting to answer a historical question or solve a historical problem.

Claim testing, contextualization
Your claim testing skills will be put to use as you evaluate the documents based upon your intuition, logic, the authority of the source, and historical evidence to establish the context in which the document was written and the credibility of the source.

In this activity, you’ll read primary and secondary source excerpts, complete the Sourcing Tool focusing on audience and point of view, and write a response to a prompt. This activity has you read excerpts from three sources: two primary sources and one secondary source. Primary sources are generally ones that were written in the time that you’re studying—in this case, during the period of the abolition movement. Secondary sources are ones that generally were written outside of the time period, after the historical event under study, and include an analysis or evaluation of primary source material.

First, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Sourcing – Why Was Slavery Abolished? worksheet, which includes the excerpts you’ll be reading as well as the Sourcing Tool. Then, you’ll be assigned a number from 1 to 3. If you’re assigned the number 1, you’ll read the first excerpt, which is from Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery; if you’re assigned the number 2, you’ll read the excerpt by William Lloyd Garrison; and if you’re assigned number 3, you’ll read the excerpt by Ottobah Cugoano.

As you read your assigned excerpt, think about these questions: Why was slavery abolished? Was the main reason a result of morality, economics, or empathy?

After you’ve finished reading, complete the Sourcing Tool for your assigned excerpt, focusing on the Audience and Point of View rows of the tool. Then, write a brief response (two to three sentences) summarizing your findings.

Next, you’ll form a new group, one that will include three students, each of whom has read a different excerpt. Each of your group’s members will be the “expert” on which source document you read.  You’ll take turns sharing the Source Tool summaries you each wrote for your assigned excerpts with your group members.

After each expert has shared their summary, you’ll write a paragraph, either in your small groups or on your own, that answers the questions posed earlier:

Why was slavery abolished? Was the main reason a result of morality, economics, or empathy?

Your paragraphs should make specific reference to the Audience and Point of View rows of the tool, but can include other categories as well.

Next, you’ll share your paragraph with the class and discuss how these texts supported, extended, or challenged the information you’ve learned thus far in the course, in particular the arguments laid out in the article “Why Was Slavery Abolished? Three Theories,” which you may have previously read. Finally, answer this question: How does sourcing numerous historical texts help you answer this historical problem? Be prepared to share your answer with the class.

As an extension, your teacher may ask you to answer the questions in the Why? (Importance) row of the tool on your own to turn in as an exit ticket.

Your teacher will collect your worksheets and responses to evaluate how your sourcing skills are progressing.