Social History for Every Classroom

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Social History for Every Classroom

menuAmerican Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

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This booklet is curriculum support for the American Social History Project's 30-minute documentary Five Points: New York's Irish Working Class in the 1850s. The viewer's guide contains background information on issues raised by the documentary as…

This database allows users to explore Five Points using data compiled from the 1855 New York State Census. Search census records from 1,333 individuals in the database to learn about the residents of New York City's legendary immigrant neighborhood.

MarriageRecords.tiff
A selection of marriage records transcribed from the original marriage certificates of the Church of the Transfiguration located in Lower Manhattan in present-day Chinatown.

emigrantBank.tiff
This sample of account records from Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank provides evidence about the lives of immigrants living in New York City during the mid-nineteenth century. All account holders included in this sample lived in the Five Points…

This page from the 1855 census for New York City's Sixth Ward, the home of the Five Points neighborhood, includes residents of two buildings. The notorious Five Points, formed by the intersections of Mulberry, Orange, Anthony, Cross, and Little Water…

Troubled by evidence of extreme poverty in the nation's industrializing cities, many Protestant reformers set up mission houses in poor, immigrant neighborhoods to minister to the needs of the largely Catholic residents. But a cultural abyss divided…

This letter to the New-York Daily Times, published on June 14, 1854, attempts to explain the high rate of criminality among Irish immigrants in terms of environment rather than temperment. The Irish-surnamed writer argues that the Irish are not…

This 1855 newspaper account of election day in lower Manhattan is filled with the reporter's assumptions about the Five Points immigrant neighborhood and its residents. Irish immigrants had by this time garnered a reputation for disorderliness and…

5ptsMap1.tif
In 1854 the names of the original streets, Cross, Anthony, Orange, and Little Water, which had formed the Five Points intersection (marked with a star) from which the neighborhood derived its name were changed to Park, Worth, Baxter and Mission…

Fivepoints.png
This 1899 map of lower Manhattan includes the intersection of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets, known as Five Points. Block 160 is marked and shaded.
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