Social History for Every Classroom

Search

Social History for Every Classroom

menuAmerican Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

Browse Items (39 total)

Many visitors—journalists, reformers, middle-class tourists hoping to brush up against the masses—traveled through the Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan in the nineteenth century. They left these observations.

This activity helps students navigate and make sense of the information available in the Five Points census database. In the activity, students use the database to test hypotheses about life and residents in the Five Points. For this activity,…

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.

In this activity students gather and analyze data from the 1855 census of the Five Points neighborhood. Students compare stereotypes of Irish immigrants with evidence from the census. Then students compare their census research with other primary…

These worksheets help students gather evidence from the Five Points census database. Students then compare their data with prevailing 19th century stereotypes of Irish immigrants and conclude whether or not they were accurate. These worksheets are…

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…

Five Pointers were destitute when they arrived and settled in New York’s poorest and most run-down neighborhood. 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…

teawares.jpg
This tea set, manufactured in England, was uncovered during an archaeological dig of the former Five Points neighborhood, at the site of a former tenement building at 472 Pearl Street. While the neighborhood was known for its poverty and vice, this…

In this activity students learn about the religious, class, and ethnic tensions between reformers and residents in the working-class Irish immigrant neighborhood of Five Points. Students research roles of a Protestant reformer and two Irish women…
Output Formats

atom, dcmes-xml, json, omeka-xml, rss2