Lesson Plans

Who Really Built America
Students are immersed in primary source materials that relate to child labor in American from 1880 to 1920 to gain a personal perspective of how work affected the American child within a rapidly growing industrial society.

Child Labor in America
Children have always worked, often exploited and under less than healthy conditions. Industrialization, the Great Depression and the vast influx of poor immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, made it easy to justify the work of young children.  This unit asks students to critically examine, respond to and report on photographs as historical evidence.

Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor
Using photographs taken by Lewis Hines that investigates child labor students, students learn about the Child Labor and the efforts of this photographer to end it.

Heaven will Protect the Working Girl
This collection of four on-lessons/activities that deal with women laborers has some especially good writing projects within them.

The 1938 San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike
This creation of the Women and Social Movements project at SUNY Binghamton, uses the newspaper coverage of the 1938 pecan shellers strike in San Antonio to examine the role of women and of left-wing politics in the strike.

Unions Now and Then
Created by Paul Hewitt, a teacher of American History at Davison High School, Davison, Michigan, the site includes five lesson plans and links to significant documents.

Curriculum of United States Labor History
This curriculum guide was created by James D. Brown, Jr. for the Illinois Labor History Society in cooperation with teachers from the metro Chicago area and local union members.