CHAPTER 24 PRIMARY SOURCE WRITING ACTIVITY
Building Walls
This activity asks you to compare arguments for and against immigration.
Objective: In this activity, you will analyze primary sources to better understand a topic of historical significance and to cultivate strong critical thinking, analysis, and writing skills.
Activity Prompt: Write an essay describing pro- and anti-immigrant views in the early twentieth century. What groups were encouraged to come to America? Who was discouraged, and why? Is immigration essential to American identity, or does it destroy it? Use details from each of the primary sources below to support your argument.
Activity Response Length and Format:
Your essay should address the question completely and be approximately 250 to 400 words, double-spaced, in 12-point font. If they are provided, follow your instructor’s specific guidelines in terms of content, length, and formatting.
Steps to Complete This Assignment:
1. Analyze the primary sources provided in the Ch24ActivityGuidelines.docx document, review the chapter reading, and respond to the writing activity. Consider how these sources relate to and provide insight into views of immigration. What basic issues are still being debated today? Where do you stand?
2. Here are the related steps:
a. Examine the first primary source, an image of women in a New York tenement.
b. Read the second primary source, an excerpt from the playwright Israel Zangwill.
c. Examine the third primary source, a cartoon about the hypocrisy of assimilated anti-immigrants.
d. Respond to the Activity Prompt by uploading your attached essay document into the MindTap where prompted to do so.
• Use the three primary sources included here, as well as the contextual information that you have learned about immigration and anti-immigrant sentiments, to support your argument.
Primary Sources for This Activity
Primary Source
1
Source 1 Title/Location: Italian Immigrant Women and Children Sewing Garments as Piecework in a New York Tenement, ca. 1905; Makers of America: The Italians, Image 24.4
Description of This Source:
In this New York tenement, women and children alike take in piecework to contribute to the incomes of their families, while their husbands presumably work somewhere else in the city.
Source 1:
Credit Line: Lewis W. Hine/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Primary Source 2
Source 2 Title/Location:
24-4 Narrowing the Welcome Mat, text from the work of playwright Israel Zangwill
Description of This Source: In response to nativists who condemned the New Immigrants as despicable human specimens threatening to drag down the American race, the Jewish immigrant playwright Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) celebrated the new superior American emerging out of what he called “the great melting pot” of European races.
Source 2 Text:
“America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American!”
Primary Source 3
Source 3 Title/Location: Looking Backward; 24-4 Narrowing the Welcome Mat, Image 24.10
Description of This Source: Older immigrants, trying to keep their own humble arrival in America “in the shadows,” sought to close the bridge that had carried them and their ancestors across the Atlantic.
Source 3:
Credit Line: GRANGER—All rights reserved.
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