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The Pay Envelope: A Role Play
In this activity students perform a role play of immigrant mothers and daughters arguing over who should get to keep the daughter's wages. This activity is used to teach with the film Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, but can be completed [...]
Female Garment Workers Labor in a New York City Tenement
Concentrated in New York City, the garment industry developed side by side with the sweatshop system of labor. Sweatshops employed a handful of workers, almost all of whom were immigrant Jewish or Italian women. They were supervised by contractors [...]
Fruit Plantations Advertise for Japanese Workers
Sugar growers made a deal with the Japanese government in 1884 that allowed thousands of Japanese to immigrate to the Hawaiian islands to work on plantations. Western growers were also eager to tap into this new, un-unionized and cheap labor source. [...]
An Ybor City Resident Describes Work in the Cigar Factories
The family of Cesar Marcos Medina moved from Cuba to Ybor City in Tampa, Florida in 1903. In this interview, Medina details the experiences of his father, who worked as a lector (reader) in the city's cigar factories. Medina also describes the [...]
A Lector Reads to Cigar Workers
The lector, or reader, was an institution in Tampa cigar factories. Elected and paid by the workers, the lector read material of their choosing aloud as the workers assembled cigars. Lectores read newspapers, current affairs publications, and even [...]
Background Essay on Early Twentieth Century Mexican Immigration to the U.S.
This essay outlines the reasons for Mexican immigration to the United States during the early part of the twentieth century as well as the issues immigrants confronted in their new home.
Mexican and Japanese Laborers Form a Union
In 1903, Mexican and Japanese farmworkers in Oxnard, California joined together to resist a wage cut by their employers. When they requested that their union be allowed to join the American Federation of Labor, President Samuel Gompers told the [...]
Coal Miners' Final Messages (1902)
Working as a coal miner in the early 20th century was incredibly dangerous. In addition to the dangers faced by miners, coal mining has a considerably detrimental impact on the environment. On May 19, 1902, a coal mine exploded near Fraterville, [...]
Lenora M. Barry Describes Women's Working Conditions in New Jersey (1887)
Lenora M. Barry was the national women’s organizer for the Knights of Labor in the late nineteenth century. The Knights of Labor aimed to improve the lives and health of laborers by encouraging them to organize unions and other groups to fight for [...]
Women in the Workplace Discussion
This lesson puts two primary sources in conversation with one another and encourages students to compare the authors’ perspectives on women in various industries in the late 19th century.