Contributor: Danielle Childers. Lesson ID: 10517
Imagine sharing a room with your WHOLE family! 100 years ago, families in New York City did just that. You will use primary resources to observe, interpret, and ask questions to understand that time!
Do you have to share a room with a sibling? Even if you don’t, can you imagine what it would be like? Now think about sleeping with your whole family in one room! That was a reality for many children in New York in 1900!
When people in the late 1800s and early 1900s immigrated to the United States, they mainly lived on the east coast, New York City being the most popular city.
To learn more about the immigrants during this time period, explore the Elephango lesson found in Additional Resources in the right-hand sidebar.
Many immigrants were coming from European countries, escaping religious or political oppression. This means people living in these countries were not allowed to believe in what they wanted. Many were coming for a chance at a better life and making money.
With such a great number of immigrants coming to New York City, jobs and housing were hard to find. To learn more about the life of an immigrant family, you are going to study primary sources from a family living back in that time period. If you want to learn more about what a primary source is, check out the Elephango lesson in Additional Resources. Also, here is a Primary vs Secondary Sources video to help you review:
If you completed the Related Lesson in the right-hand sidebar, you learned that the 3 steps historians use to investigate primary resources are:
We will use those steps in this lesson as well. You will be looking at primary resources from a typical immigrant family in New York City. Here is a picture of an object from this time period. Let’s look at it together and work through the 3 steps:
Image courtesy of the Tenement Museum
First Observe the object in the above picture.
Second Think about the observations.
Third Think about what questions you have that could help make a connection to this object and the time period for which it was found.