History Curriculum/Book 21

Book twenty-one of the curriculum

The History of the Progressive Era

The twenty-first book in the curriculum and the third of the Late American History set. Eighteen chapters across four weeks — first the problems the reformers set out to solve: the tenements and factories of the new industrial cities, the political machines, the laws of segregation, the farmers' grievances and adulterated food; then the reformers and what they did: the muckraking magazines, the antitrust suits, the labor and child-labor laws, the suffrage campaigns and the conservation of forests and parks; then the reforms the Guide groups as going too far: eugenics and the sterilization laws, the immigration acts, the wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts, and Prohibition; and last segregation within the reform era, the reformers who wrote that experts should guide the public, and the amendments that widened the vote, ending with the Nineteenth in 1920. TWO THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START. First, the first-person accounts in both printed editions are HISTORICAL FICTION — written to tell the story, informed by the surviving record, and not the words of the people named. Most narrators are real people, but some speak of things that happened after they died, a few are invented, and some meet in scenes that never took place. The record itself is very large: the laws and amendments, the Supreme Court's opinions and dissents, the reports of Congress and of commissions, the reformers' and their opponents' own books and articles, the census and the photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine — and this course quotes them. Second, at the back of the Ultimate Guide, after the chapters (pages 355–391), there are Cross-Curricular sections — Math, Science, Health, Social Studies and English — and questions with answer keys, to use alongside this course. They are not a fifth week and there is nothing to hand in for them.