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Week Six |
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Reading for this week:
- American Promise: "Progressivism from the Grass Roots to the White House";
- Nash, "Hetch Hetchy";
- From American Museum of Natural History: Watch and watch;
- Read the term-paper assignment.
Discussion questions:
1. What issues and beliefs helped unite the diverse group of reformers known as progressives? Explain the key ideas and main groups that shaped the Progressive movement.
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“Street Arabs in the Area of Mulberry Street,” from Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890) |
2. How did reform Darwinism become the philosophical basis of the progressive movement in the early 1900s? What role did people like Jane Addams and Jacob Riis play (click image to right for larger)?
3. How did the temperance reform movement reflect the concerns and biases of progressive reformers?
4. Explain the fundamental differences in the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois in regard to elevating the status of African Americans.
5. Describe the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in 1911. Was it a wake-up call to managers and capitalists? Why or why not?
6. Discuss how working empowered women in the Progressive era. Explain how reformers focusing on the effects of work on women’s bodies both helped and hindered female laborers.
7. How did President Theodore Roosevelt’s insistence on regulating the trusts change the relationship between business and government? Cite examples of that change.
8. How did labor strife bring new meaning to the idea of freedom of expression, and what was the new workingman’s conception of industrial liberty, as defined by John Mitchell?