Focus: The resources for this unit (Reform in Industrial America) are part of the individual resources titled The Making of America: Immigration, Industrialization, and Reform. In this unit (Unit 9 for schools using the CKHG™ series in Sequence grade-level order), students examine the groups and individuals who worked for political, economic, and social reform in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
This period was a time of extremes and inequities in America, with railroad tycoons and oil magnates living in cities populated by impoverished immigrant factory workers, many farmers struggling to survive, African Americans living under Jim Crow laws that took away their civil rights, and women still not allowed to vote. Students also learn that populist farmers, muckrakers, urban reformers, suffragettes, civil rights leaders, and social reformers worked to ease the credit crunch, expose the excesses of big business, improve tenement housing, obtain equal rights for African Americans and for women, and improve the lives of workers. President Theodore Roosevelt pushed for conservation measures, and Americans showed they could work together to improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
Number of Lessons: 15
Lesson Time: 45 minutes each daily. Each lesson may be divided into shorter segments.
Additional Search Terms: social studies • nonfiction • informational text • geography • map skills • Populism • free silver • William Jennings Bryan • muckrakers • Ida Tarbell • John D. Rockefeller • Sherman Antitrust Act • trusts • Upton Sinclair • Jane Addams • Hull House • Jacob Riis • tenements • Theodore Roosevelt • conservation • national parks • Fourteenth Amendment • Jim Crow laws • separate but equal • civil rights • Ida B. Wells • lynching • Booker T. Washington • Tuskegee Institute • W.E.B. Du Bois • The Souls of Black Folk • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) • women’s suffrage • Susan B. Anthony • Nineteenth Amendment • Eugene Debs • socialism • Pullman Strike
CKHG Grade Levels: CKHG units are correlated to topics at the grade levels specified in the Core Knowledge Sequence, which allows students in schools following the Sequence to build knowledge grade by grade. This particular unit falls in Grade 6 in the Core Knowledge Sequence. In other settings, individual CKHG units may be used as supplemental resources. In general, the content and presentation in the CKHG units for Grade 6 are appropriate for students in Grade 6 and up.
