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The Jungle (Excerpt)
Upton Sinclair's novel about immigrant workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants shocked readers when it was first published in 1906. Sinclair hoped the novel would awaken Americans to the evils of capitalism; the main character Jurgis ends the novel [...]
The Brooklyn Consumers' League Takes on Sweatshops
Women, who did most of the shopping in turn-of-the-century households, used their purchasing power to push forward many Progressive reforms. They organized local and national consumers' leagues to boycott businesses that employed unfair labor [...]
Pupils Study in San Francisco's Chinatown
This photograph shows a schoolroom scene from San Francisco's Chinese Public School, circa late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The Chinese immigrant students are taught by a middle-class white woman. Note the students' traditional dress and [...]
"Bandit's Roost"
Jacob Riis—a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant—exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, first published in [...]
"A Settlement house worker visits a newly-arrived family"
Progressive reformers established settlement houses to aid new immigrants and instill American middle class values. Some social workers were sympathetic to the immigrants' problems and helped publicize their plight. Others were critical of immigrant [...]
"Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement"
Lodgers in a boarding room on New York's Bayard Street charging "five cents a spot" exemplify the overcrowded, frequently squalid living conditions that immigrants in New York City faced at the turn of the twentieth century. As documented in Jacob [...]
Background Essay on Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine
This short essay describes Jacob Riis and Lewis Hines, two important documentary photographers of the turn of the twentieth century.
An Economist Declares Mexicans "An Undesirable Class of Residents"
Discussions of the "Mexican problem" in the early 20th century often revolved around issues of race and culture, much as they did with other immigrant groups. Samuel Bryan published this study of Mexican immigrants in a leading Progressive social [...]
Progressive Era Activists Call for Trade Unions (with text supports)
Founded in 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) was an organization that brought together working-class women, reformers, and women from wealthy and prominent families. The WTUL believed that the best way to help women workers was to help [...]
The Brooklyn Consumers' League Takes on Sweatshops (short version, with text supports)
During the Progressive era, some women believed they could improve conditions for workers through their power as consumers—how they decided what products to buy, and from which stores. At both the local and national levels, women organized [...]