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Social History for Every Classroom

menuAmerican Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

Browse Items (39 total)

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…

teacup.jpg
Uncovered during an archaeological dig of the former Five Points neighborhood, this teacup depicts the Irish temperance reformer Father Theobold Mathew, who during the late 1830s and 1840s convinced Irish on both sides of the Atlantic to embrace…

The archeological excavation of the Foley Square Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, located near the former intersection that once comprised the Five Points neighborhood, yielded over 850,000 artifacts, some of which are depicted below. The artifacts…

The Five Points Mission grew out of several Protestant missionary organizations that aimed to improve conditions in the Five Points. At first they attempted to convert residents from Catholicism; later the Mission obtained pledges from Five Pointers…

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.

The Five Points House of Industry was organized by the Methodist minister Lewis M. Pease and headquartered in a notorious former slum building known as the Old Brewery. It was the first missionary effort in the neighborhood to offer vocational…

This letter home from 23-year-old Irish emigrant Margaret McCarthy captures both the opportunity and adversity awaiting arrivals to a new land. McCarthy sailed from Liverpool on the Columbus on September 7, 1849, and arrived in New York on October…

The following are excerpts from the diaries of George Templeton Strong (1820-1875), a prominent New York lawyer. Written between 1838 and 1857, the entries reveal Strong's undisguised contempt for the Irish immigrants who were then flooding the city.…

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This is a map of Block 160 in New York City's Five Points neighborhood 1902. Public opinion of the Five Points neighborhood was highly negative and filled with bias. The population of New York had ballooned by the mid-nineteenth century causing a…

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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