Students will evaluate the bias and accuracy of depictions of Five Points and its residents.
This activity supports the following Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
RHSS.6-8.7. Integrate visual information with other information in print and digital texts.
RHSS.6-8.8. Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.
RHSS.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author's point of view or purpose.
In general, the only work in the New World open to Irish men was unskilled, temporary, and often heavy. After the mid 1840s, Irish immigrants dominated day labor in most coastal towns and cities and formed the majority of workers on canals, railroads, and other construction projects. A visiting Irish journalist remarked in 1860, "There are several sorts of power working at the fabric of this Republic: water-power, steam-power, horse-power, Irish-power. The last works hardest of all."
Young Irish women did more than their share of heavy work. With more Irish women than men arriving in the United States and most families needing the labor of all their members, few women arriving from Ireland could afford the luxury of leisure.Â
Economic hardship was widespread among Irish immigrants. Extreme poverty sometimes forced immigrants to turn to petty crime to survive. Families lived in increasingly crowded and decaying neighborhoods. Boston's North End was one such place. New York's Five Points was another. Middle class observers, who often toured such neighborhoods to gape in wonder at the lower classes or sought to deliver relief in the form of charity or religious sermons, were shocked and offended by life in Five Points. Many conflated the terrible conditions of poverty with moral failings on the part of the neighborhood's residents.Â
Note:Â Each of the primary sources in this activity includes an analysis worksheet. The teacher can differentiate the activity by giving the analysis worksheets only to lower level students, or by giving higher-level students versions of the text documents without text supports.Â
Step 1: Tell students that in this activity they will consider how different types of evidence produce different views of the same event or place. They will look at images, census records, and travel narratives about the Five Points in the 19th century. Then students will decide whether the evidence shows Five Points as a neighborhood or a slum. In this activity, they will look at the immigrant neighborhood Five Points and how it was portrayed in various 19th century images and texts.Â
Pass out and/or project "New York State Census Page of Five Points, 1855." Discuss
What impression of the Five Points neighborhood do you get from this census page?
Is this an insider or outsider point of view?
Step 2:Â Tell students that they will now look at how different visitors and observers of the Five Points depicted it during the 19th century.
Divide students into pairs or groups of three. To each group, pass out the four additional documents and analysis worksheets (if using). Ask each group to choose one text and one image to focus on. They should carefully examine the document and complete the analysis worksheet.Â
Before moving onto the next step, the teacher may want to go through documents as a whole, asking groups to share out what they noticed from the documents they chose.Â
Step 3: If using Smartboard, project Slide 6 "Neighborhood or Slum?". Ask for volunteers to slide each document to one side or the other, depending on how it depicts the neighborhood, or somewhere in between if it presents evidence of Five Points as both slum and neighborhood.Â
If not using Smartboard, replicate by making a "spectrum" on the board by drawing a horizontal line and writing "neighborhood" on one end and "slum" on the other. Have students tape printouts of the documents along the line. Â
Conclude by discussing what kinds of biases the different sources include (or do not include). Ask students what additional sources can help us understand Five Points better (census records, archaeological evidence, first-person accounts from people who lived in the neighborhood).Â
This worksheet aligns to Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
RHSS.6-8.6. Identify aspects of a text that reveal an author's point of view or purpose.
This worksheet aligns to Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
RHSS.6-8.8. Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.
The potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s spurred the migration of thousands of impoverished Irish to the United States. The new immigrants—rural, Catholic, and starving—settled in the poorest districts of large cities in the East, including in New York’s Five Points neighborhood in downtown Manhattan.
The story of Five Points sheds light on a number of important themes in nineteenth-century U.S. history. It is a window into a period—the 1850s—that marked the start of rapid change in American society, as the country became more urban, more industrialized, and, because of changes in transportation and communication technologies, more connected. Immigration is an important part of this story, both because immigrants contributed to the growing urban population and because their cheap labor fueled the factories and built the roads, canals, tunnels, and rail lines of the emerging industrial order.
Immigrant groups employed a number of strategies to survive in new homes and to challenge discrimination. Five Pointers were destitute when they arrived and settled in one of New York’s poorest and most run-down neighborhoods. On top of this, Irish Five Pointers worked for some of the lowest wages in the most dangerous and unstable jobs in the city. Statistics attest to the dire and exceptional conditions of the neighborhood: 66% of patients being treated for bone fractures in one downtown hospital were Irish, a third of children in the neighborhood did not live past their fifth birthday, and, because Irish men worked in such dangerous occupations, nearly one out of every five households in Five Points was headed by a woman. Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in an era before formal governmental aid, when private charities provided the primary—and inadequate—relief funds, meals, and training. Yet Five Pointers built strong community institutions, such as churches, saloons, and fire companies, to support each other, gain some say in local government, and shield themselves from prejudice and poverty. They created a vibrant working-class culture that helped them survive and eventually helped shape American culture as a whole.
A recurrent theme in U.S. history is the tension between Americans’ need for labor and their anxiety about new immigrant groups. Nativists in the 1840s and 1850s feared that Irish Catholics could not be assimilated. They believed immigrant culture, religion, and social customs degraded “real†American society and feared immigrants’ growing political power. Political cartoonists often expressed this fear by depicting the Irish in demeaning, stereotypical, and sub-human caricatures, similar to those that portrayed African Americans. While the Irish had more political power than other poor ethnic groups in the 1850s (African Americans were subject to property requirements in order to vote in New York) they were victims of discrimination, prejudice, and violence.
Let us go on again...and...plunge into the Five Points.... We have seen no beggars in the street by night or day, but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now. This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left and reeking every where with dirt and filth.... Many of these pigs [wandering the streets foraging for food] live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? And why they talked instead of grunted?... Here, too, are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee deep; underground chambers where they dance and game...hideous tenements which take the name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decay are here.
The buildings are very little, old, frame houses, and look like some little country village.... It appeared as if the cellars were jam full of people; and such fiddling and dancing nobody ever saw before in this world.
Black and white, white and black, all hug-em-snug together, happy as lords and ladies, sitting round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them, and I do think I saw more drunk folks, men and women, that day, than I ever saw before... I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night. I said to [my friend]...these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell's kitchen.