lesson
Labor Matters
Draw on your students' prior knowledge to help them understand the importance of the labor movement.
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lesson
Understanding Past and Present Labor Injustice through Music
Period songs give students an understanding of early 19th century labor conditions
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Informational
Declaration of Dependence
As a means to reduce and regulate child labor in the United States, the National Child Labor Committee composed a declaration, citing the current state of child labor and three resolutions to the situation.
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Informational
The Importation of Negroes into Massachusetts
In this newspaper article, the author made an argument against the importation of enslaved Africans and in favor of the importation of European servants, using race to distinguish the differences between labor.
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Informational
Commonwealth Club Address
Cesar Chavez delivered this speech on November 9, 1984. Chavez was a high-profile leader of the United Farm Workers and remains an inspiring figure in the larger labor movement.
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Visual
Flint Sit-Down Strike
Between December 1936 and February 1937, auto industry laborers in Flint, Mich., stopped working and occupied the GM factories that employed them until their right to unionize was recognized.
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Visual
Forced to Work
These images show enslaved people laboring in fields in Georgia and South Carolina.
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Contemporary Movements
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to prominence as a spokesperson for black people seeking equality, has been the catalyst for many contemporary civil rights movements (e.g., the Chicano movement, labor movement, environmental movement, women’s movement, LGBT civil rights movement, immigrant workers rights). This lesson invites students to see that they are part of a continuum in the long struggle for equal rights for all people.
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Exploring the Film: A Lesson from Viva La Causa
Using the common literary strategy of prediction, students will write descriptive compositions based on visual prompts and will connect symbolically with one of the farmworkers or allies.
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Informational
An Act to Confiscate Property Used for Insurrectionary Purposes
In this document, the U.S. government outlined its new policy towards escaped formerly enslaved persons during the Civil War.