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Kids learn about the California Gold Rush from the Old West. Thousands of people move to the west to search for gold and strike it rich.

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International Stock Food Factory, between 1900 and 1910
Detroit Publishing Company

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy.

Industrial growth transformed American society. It produced a new class of wealthy industrialists and a prosperous middle class. It also produced a vastly expanded blue collar working class. The labor force that made industrialization possible was made up of millions of newly arrived immigrants and even larger numbers of migrants from rural areas. American society became more diverse than ever before.

Not everyone shared in the economic prosperity of this period. Many workers were typically unemployed at least part of the year, and their wages were relatively low when they did work. This situation led many workers to support and join labor unions. Meanwhile, farmers also faced hard times as technology and increasing production led to more competition and falling prices for farm products. Hard times on farms led many young people to move to the city in search of better job opportunities.

Americans who were born in the 1840s and 1850s would experience enormous changes in their lifetimes. Some of these changes resulted from a sweeping technological revolution. Their major source of light, for example, would change from candles, to kerosene lamps, and then to electric light bulbs. They would see their transportation evolve from walking and horse power to steam-powered locomotives, to electric trolley cars, to gasoline-powered automobiles. Born into a society in which the vast majority of people were involved in agriculture, they experienced an industrial revolution that radically changed the ways millions of people worked and where they lived. They would experience the migration of millions of people from rural America to the nation's rapidly growing cities.

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Overview | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy. Industrial growth transformed American society.

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Table of Contents

1. Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

2. What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

3. Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable-most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.

Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and worked 12 hours a day, every day. In 1911, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances.

Did you know? Exactly 79 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, another tragic fire occurred in New York City. The blaze, at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killed 87 people, the most deadly fire in the city since 1911.

The danger of fire in factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist was well-known, but high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government generally ensured that no useful precautions were taken to prevent fires. Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.

Added to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris' notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours a day, every day. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris' company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire began in a rag bin. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful, as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it could hold only 12 people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amid the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises-when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.

Those workers who were on floors above the fire, including the owners, escaped to the roof and then to adjoining buildings. As firefighters arrived, they witnessed a horrible scene. The girls who did not make it to the stairwells or the elevator were trapped by the fire inside the factory and began to jump from the windows to escape it. The bodies of the jumpers fell on the fire hoses, making it difficult to begin fighting the fire. Also, the firefighters ladders reached only seven floors high and the fire was on the eighth floor. In one case, a life net was unfurled to catch jumpers, but three girls jumped at the same time, ripping the net. The nets turned out to be mostly ineffectual.

Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 146 people were killed by the fire.

Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The fire helped unite organized labor and reform-minded politicians like progressive New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, one of the legislative architects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. Frances Perkins, who served on a committee that helped to set up the Factory Investigating Commission in New York in the wake of the fire, would later become Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor. The workers union set up a march on April 5 on New York's Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire. It was attended by 80,000 people.

Despite a good deal of evidence that the owners and management had been horribly negligent in the fire, a grand jury failed to indict them on manslaughter charges. To settle lawsuits against them, they eventually paid $75 in compensation to each victim's family-a fraction of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Still, the massacre for which they were responsible did finally compel the city to enact reform. In addition to the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October, the New York Democratic set took up the cause of the worker and became known as a reform party. Both were crucial in preventing similar disasters in the future.

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On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable.

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From Academic Kids

The Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin has the distinction of being the deadliest conflagration in US history. It is mostly forgotten, having occurred on October 8, 1871, the same date as the much more renowned Great Chicago Fire. Across Lake Michigan, the town of Holland, Michigan also burned down on the same day.

Peshtigo was a center of manufacture of wood products of all sorts in 1871, sitting as it did in the center of a large area of timbering. The summer was especially dry, and sporadic fires were breaking out in the surrounding forest. Deliberately-set fires were also used extensively at the time to clear land for planting crops and other development. A railroad line was being constructed from Milwaukee to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and debris from clearing the path was left to burn by the wayside. In the days before the firestorm broke out smoke from these smaller "controlled" fires was so thick that ships on the Bay of Green Bay were forced to use their foghorns and navigate by compass.

On the fateful day a cold front moved in from the west, bringing strong winds that fanned the smaller prairie fires and escalated them to Biblical proportions. By the time it was over 1,875 square miles ( 4,850 km² or 1.2 million acres) of forest were consumed, an area approximately twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Some sources list 1.5 million acres (6,000 km²) burned. Twelve towns were destroyed. An accurate death toll has never been determined since the local population records were destroyed in the fire, with estimates of between 1,200 and 2,500 people thought to have lost their lives. More than 400 bodies were buried in a mass grave primarily because so many died, no one remained alive who could identify the bodies.

The fire jumped over the water of Green Bay and burned on both sides of the inlet town. Surviving witnesses in Peshtigo reported that the firestorm generated an infernal tornado which threw rail cars and houses into the air. Many of the survivors of the firestorm escaped the flames by hiding in the Peshtigo River or other nearby bodies of water. Some people died by drowning while attempting to flee the firestorm.

The Peshtigo Fire Museum, just west of Highway 41, has a small collection of artifacts from the fire, first-person descriptions about the Peshtigo Fire told by the survivors, and a graveyard dedicated to victims of the tragedy.

National Fire Protection Week in October was started to commemorate the economic loss of the Chicago fire, which was ironically dwarfed by unremembered Peshtigo. A recent publication titled "Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History" gives a detailed account of the event. "Firestorm at Peshtigo" by Denise Gess and William Lutz describes this forgotten disaster. In the words of William Lutz, "A firestorm is called nature's nuclear explosion. Here's a wall of flame, a mile high, five miles wide, traveling 90 to 100 miles an hour, hotter than a crematorium, turning sand into glass."

The combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that created the firestorm is known as the Peshtigo Paradigm, which was studied and recreated by the American and British military during World War II for the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities.

One controversial speculation, first suggested in 1883, is that the occurrence of the Peshtigo and Chicago fires on the same day was not a coincidence, but that both fires were caused by the impact of fragments from Comet Biela.

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The Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin has the distinction of being the deadliest conflagration in US history. It is mostly forgotten, having occurred on October 8, 1871, the same date as the much more renowned Great Chicago Fire. Across Lake Michigan, the town of Holland, Michigan also burned down on the same day.

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The California Gold Rush

The discovery of gold in California in the mid-19th Century ushered in one of the largest migrations in American history, as tens of thousands of hopeful, excited, and just plain desperate participated in the California Gold Rush.

It all began on January 24, 1848, on the South Fork of the American River, near what is now the California town of Coloma. John Sutter had hired a number of people to build a saw mill in the area, and James Marshall was one of the people doing the constructing. On that fateful day, Marshall saw tiny pieces of gold in the runoff millwater. He collected some of the gold pieces and showed them to Sutter, who swore Marshall to secrecy.

Despite this agreement, the story got out, possibly because Marshall wouldn't have been the only one to notice the gold in the millwater. Nevertheless, the story was soon a well-travelled one, with a publisher named Samuel Brannan soon walking up and down the streets of San Francisco holding a jar full of gold. The first major East Coast newspaper to report Marshall's discovery, the New York Herald, did so on August 19. President James K. Polk told the nation about the gold discovery in an address to Congress on December 5. Before long, the rush was on and '49ers, as they were called (after the year in which they set out, 1849), descended on California by the tens of thousands.

In 1849, the gold-motivated migrants numbered 80,000. Most of those were Americans in 1849, but the following few years saw gold-seekers come from all over the world. By 1856, more than 300,000 people had followed their gold dreams to what they hoped were the gold fields of California.

In the beginning, prospectors could find gold nuggets by sifting through the top one or two layers of dirt or in streams and riverbeds, using methods such as panning. As the gold supply dwindled and desire for gold increased, prospectors employed more sophisticated methods.

Many of the '49ers and other prospectors who came to California in search of a dream found they liked the place enough to stay. San Francisco went from an 1846 population of 200 to an 1852 population of 36,000. Other California cities and towns experienced similar growth. As a result, California became a state, in 1850, its infrastructure growing by leaps and bounds: Schools, churches, roads, and businesses rose from empty land, as many people found themselves earning a good living by providing goods and services to prospectors. Supply stores, warehouses, taverns, and hotels dotted the landscape, surrounding the areas where gold was known to be.

Modern-day estimates from the U.S. Government put the amount of gold discovered in the first five years of the California Gold Rush at 12 million ounces, worth more than $16 billion in today's dollars.

Many settlers made homes for themselves by displacing (and, in some cases, ending the lives of) Native Americans, continuing a Manifest Destiny trend that had begun in the East and continued in the Midwest and South.

Many others chasing their dreams found nothing but frustration. Many prospecting hopefuls spent all of the money that they had on the search for great wealth and ended up with none of their own. For many, the travel to California would have cost a steep price, especially if they had come from Latin America or Europe or China or Australia, as a great many did. The Americans who migrated westward generally crossed the Rocky Mountains or the Isthmus of Panama to get to gold country. People who came from other countries made great use of boats that docked in San Francisco and other, more southern ports.

The legality of various prospectors' claims to gold was not at all straightforward. When Marshall first found gold, on January 24, the land was still technically owned by Mexico, although that country had surrendered to U.S. forces, ending the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the war, went into effect on February 2. Even then, California was under the control of the U.S. Military.

American soldiers did not roam the gold fields, however. The areas were largely self-policed, which allowed for all sorts of varied rules of law. As towns sprang up, rural law enforcement made its presence felt.

What this meant for the initial waves of prospectors, however, is that the gold was theirs for the taking, no questions asked, no taxes assessed, no price to be paid other than the hard labor expended to find the gold in the first place. Protecting that find proved problematic for many. The only real solution to the lawlessness that existed in some areas was the drying up of the gold deposits, making it unpalatable for anyone looking for quick and easy wealth.

The California Gold Rush was not kind to Sutter or Marshall, either. Unequipped with his own private security force, Sutter could do little to stem the tide of prospectors who camped on the land on which he had intended to complete his sawmill. He saw his dreams of an agriculture bonanza dry up in the dust left by prospectors' boots and horses' hooves. Marshall had little luck prospecting, either. Both men died poor and forgotten, except for the part that they played in setting off the Gold Rush in the first place.

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The California Gold Rush The discovery of gold in California in the mid-19th Century ushered in one of the largest migrations in American history, as tens of thousands of hopeful, excited, and just plain desperate participated in the California Gold Rush.

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Immigration to the U.S. in the Late 1800s | National Geographic Society

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The author behind the authoritative retelling of the 1911 fire describes how he researched the tragedy that killed 146 people

On March 25, 1911, a pleasant springtime afternoon, a fire broke out in a garment factory near Washington Square in New York City's Greenwich Village. Within minutes, the entire eighth floor of the ten-story tower was full of flames. Onlookers, drawn by the column of smoke and the clamor of converging fire wagons, watched helplessly and in horror as dozens of workers screamed from the ninth-floor windows. They were trapped by flames, a collapsed fire escape and a locked door. Firefighters frantically cranked a rescue ladder, which rose slowly skyward-then stopped at the sixth floor, fully extended. Pressed by the advancing blaze, workers began leaping and tumbling to their deaths on the sidewalk. Other workers perished in the flames, still others plunged into an open elevator shaft, while behind the factory two dozen fell from the flimsy fire escape. In all, 146 workers, most of them immigrant young women and girls, perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. For 90 years it stood as New York's deadliest workplace disaster.

This story-and the fire's impact on the politics of New York and the nation-took hold of me in the early 1990s. I had moved to the Village as a reporter for the Miami Herald, and one day, while exploring the neighborhood, I was surprised to find the factory tower still standing at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. In the years that followed, I often passed that corner and always paused to look up at those ninth-floor windows.

My curiosity led me to a spare and forceful book, The Triangle Fire. Written by a labor organizer named Leon Stein and published in 1962, the book was both harrowing and somewhat frustrating. Stein had interviewed dozens of survivors, tracked down a number of original records and rendered the story in taut prose. But many of the questions that most interested me were taken for granted by Stein, who spent his career in the New York garment industry, a world stamped by the Triangle tragedy. I was hungry for more about the context and characters surrounding this event, which influenced such momentous figures as the progressive New York governor Alfred E. Smith, the New Deal architect Senator Robert F. Wagner and the pioneering Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. But no full-length study of the fire and its impact on politics had been written in the decades after Stein's book.

So I proposed to write my own.

How rash! But my folly dawned on me slowly-and only after I had blown a substantial stack of my publisher's advance on diapers, formula and preschool tuition. I discovered that virtually all the key documents concerning the Triangle fire had been lost or destroyed. Records of the fire marshal's investigation: long gone. Files of the coroner's special jury: vanished.

Worst of all, I couldn't find the official transcript of the trial of Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, the Triangle factory owners, who had been charged with manslaughter on the theory that their negligence caused the workers' deaths. Their three-week trial in December 1911 collected sworn testimony from more than 150 witnesses who were questioned while details of the disaster were still relatively fresh in their minds. Dozens of survivors, including Harris and Blanck themselves, recounted their narrow escapes, while firefighters, police officers and building engineers added details of the factory layout and the fire's awful progress. No other document could take me closer to that factory in the moments before and after the fire erupted.

I knew that a transcript had been prepared, because Stein had used it in his research: his notes were part of the labor history archive at the Kheel Center at Cornell University. Yet when I contacted the New York City archives, I was told that, well, the transcript-all 2,000-plus pages-seemed to have been lost. It apparently vanished, wouldn't you know, during a project to preserve historic documents. Sometime around 1970, an archives official explained, New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice received a grant to transfer important court records to microfilm. Somewhere between the courthouse and the college, the Triangle record was lost forever.

Still, I figured there must be other copies, prepared for the prosecutor or the defense attorney. I inquired at other New York colleges and universities, at the New York Public Library, at various city museums and state archives. Coming up empty, I turned to the multitude of daily newspapers from 1911. Surely the sensational trial of Harris and Blanck must have been covered extensively, in front-page stories full of colorful details and verbatim testimony.

Nope. My heart sank as I fed rolls of microfilm into reading machines at the Library of Congress (having moved to Washington as a reporter for the Washington Post). There was next to nothing in the New York World, the American, the Herald, the Times, the Tribune, the Post. Only the most dramatic testimony and the verdict-not guilty-registered more than a few paragraphs stashed in the back pages.

My frustration turned to panic. Samuel Johnson famously declared that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and I have never been wealthy enough to test his theory. The money I had taken was now gone, even as the bills continued to arrive. I began to lose hope that I could actually make a book from the scraps and remnants I had been compiling.

Which was sad, because some of the scraps were fascinating. Virtually nothing had been known about the young women who worked and died in the Triangle factory, but I was finding whispers of their brief stories in old census records and city maps. The microfilmed record of a Socialist newspaper in New York, the Call, contained a haunting half page of photographs of Triangle fire victims, lent by their grieving families. The same newspaper fleshed out Harris and Blanck's role in resisting efforts to unionize the garment factories.

Such discoveries kept me plodding along, despite flagging hopes. One spring day in 2001, almost exactly 90 years after the fire, I turned my attention at the Library of Congress to the high-priced attorney Harris and Blanck hired to save them from prison. Max D. Steuer was among the most colorful figures in the peacock gallery of New York before World War I. An immigrant and former sweatshop worker, Steuer rose to the pinnacle of the New York bar, starring as courtroom magician in dramas ranging from celebrity sex scandals to securities frauds to the disputed wills of dysfunctional dynasties. He became known as "Million-Dollar Steuer" in the Hearst newspapers until he complained about it to one of his clients: William Randolph Hearst. The Triangle trial-specifically, Steuer's cunning cross-examination of the star prosecution witness-was a key moment in his legendary career.

I found a sketch of Steuer's life in the Dictionary of American Biography, published in the early 1960s. The entry ended with a list of sources printed in tiny type. One note caught my eye: "Collections of the records and briefs of cases in which Steuer appeared are in the N.Y. County Lawyers' Assoc." What records?

I looked up the NYCLA on the Internet and was pleased to find that it still existed. It had been founded early in the 20th century as an alternative to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, which-in those days-was not open to women, blacks or Jews like Steuer. A few calls led me to Ralph Monaco, director of the NYCLA library, who seemed genuinely interested in my saga-and genuinely sorry to tell me he had no idea what records the Dictionary was talking about.

That was the low point.

Three days later, Monaco called back. He had posted a listserv message explaining my plight to the Law Librarians Association of Greater New York. One of his predecessors as director of the NYCLA library, Alison Alifano, saw the message and replied that a collection of Steuer's records was somewhere in the library. She just was not sure where. Then a veteran library employee named Jose Rosario unearthed what appeared to be a transcript from the stacks.

I told Monaco I could be in New York the next day.

How about next week? he countered. Promptly at 9 the next Monday morning, I entered NYCLA's downtown headquarters, an elegant Cass Gilbert landmark in the twin shadows of the World Trade Center towers. On Monaco's desk, I finally laid eyes on my prize: two fat, antique, leather-bound tomes, labeled Vol. 1 and Vol. 3. Vol. 2 appeared to be missing, so Rosario and I went back to the stacks to hunt for it. He led me to a shelf of similar books, all from Steuer's estate. Scanning the spines, I realized that he had commemorated his greatest trial victories by binding his carbon-copy transcripts in gold-lettered leather. Upon his death in 1940, he bequeathed these trophies to NYCLA. And as his fame had faded with the passing decades, they were relegated to storage and forgotten.

We never found the missing volume, but that hardly dampened my excitement as I turned the first of more than 1,300 pages of recovered history. For much of the next two weeks, I read slowly through the sometimes tangled testimony and typed thousands of words of notes and quotations into my laptop. Photocopying the volumes was out of the question-the cheap paper, nearly a century old, was crumbling between my fingers. In fact, I began to worry that Monaco would call a halt to my reading because the books were falling apart. So I sat at a table as far from the reference desk as I could get, and swept small drifts of paper crumbs into my briefcase to hide them.

Each morning, however, Monaco and his colleagues welcomed me back. And gradually I learned not only what it was like to endure the fire but also what it was like to work at the Triangle Waist Co. Notorious today as a classic sweatshop, the Triangle was a model of modern efficiency to its owners and employees. Indeed, as I came to understand the factory, the pace of daily work and the intricate relationships inside the large, family-run business, I could see how the factory's scale and efficiency helped cause the tragedy. Specially designed bins held hundreds of pounds of scrap cotton and tissue paper at a time. In one of these bins, just before the quitting bell rang, a fire kindled. The supply of fuel turned the factory into what a fire captain called "a mass of traveling fire" within 15 minutes.

Some testimony was spellbinding, such as factory foreman Samuel Bernstein's marathon account of his efforts to fight the fire and save the workers. Capt. Howard Ruch of the New York Fire Department told of his initial survey of the charred ninth floor. "I stepped on something that was soft," he said, and only then realized he had reached a pile of bodies. Line by line, the transcript restored history to three dimensions and provided a Rosetta stone for understanding Leon Stein's notes from the lost volume of testimony.

Through the cooperation of NYCLA and Cornell, my experience of reading the lost transcripts is now available to anyone with an Internet connection. In 2004, Kheel Center director Richard Strassberg carried the Steuer volumes to the Ithaca campus, where each page was scanned and digitized. Because the quality of the originals was so poor, the process captured only about 40 percent of the text. So Patricia Leary of the Kheel Center painstakingly corrected every page.

Last autumn, after more than a year of effort, the Kheel Center posted the entire text on its Triangle fire Web site: ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire. The site, which receives some six million visitors each year, is a model for archivists who want to make their records available to students and researchers. By June, portions of the recovered record had been downloaded more than 1,100 times, Strassberg reports, including nearly 400 complete copies.

The Triangle fire catalyzed reforms in New York that spread nationwide-outward-swinging exit doors and sprinklers in high-rise buildings, for example. These reforms in turn fueled the careers of people like Smith and Wagner and Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Half a century after the fire, she still pointed to that day as the birth of the New Deal. Today, the memory of the fire moves reformers to wonder why some workers in the United States-and many more abroad-still toil in needlessly dangerous conditions.

Those who experienced the horror firsthand could not have anticipated the impact. Nor could they have imagined that, someday-thanks to a lawyer's vanity, a buried footnote, a diligent librarian and the power of technology-their long-silent voices could speak directly of their experiences to readers around the world.

David Von Drehlewrote Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.

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Uncovering the History of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

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On March 25, 1911, a pleasant springtime afternoon, a fire broke out in a garment factory near Washington Square in New York City's Greenwich Village. Within minutes, the entire eighth floor of the ten-story tower was full of flames.

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The Peshtigo Fire was a great fire in on October, 8, 1871 in Peshtigo, a town in Wisconsin in the United States. It was a natural disaster. The fire killed over 1,500 people.

Images for kids

One of the few pieces of lumber to survive the fire

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The Peshtigo Fire was a great fire in on October, 8, 1871 in Peshtigo, a town in Wisconsin in the United States. It was a natural disaster. The fire killed over 1,500 people. One of the few pieces of lumber to survive the fire

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U.S. Immigration Timeline: Definition & Reform - HISTORY

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A timeline of U.S. immigration shows how, from the 1600s to today, the United States became a nation of people from hundreds of cultures, languages and beliefs.

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a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Factory in New York City. Within 18 minutes, 146 people were dead as a result
of the fire.

This site includes original sources on the fire held at the ILR School's Kheel Center, an archive of historical material on labor and industrial relations.

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Cornell University - ILR School - The Triangle Factory Fire

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a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Factory in New York City. Within 18 minutes, 146 people were dead as a resultof the fire. This site includes original sources on the fire held at the ILR School's Kheel Center, an archive of historical material on labor and industrial relations.

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The small town of Peshtigo in northeastern Wisconsin was the site of one of the worst fires in American history, on Oct. 8, 1871. The fire went generally unnoticed outside the town because the famous Chicago fire occurred on the same day. The Peshtigo fire began as a forest fire. It destroyed some 1,200,000 acres (500,000 hectares), burned the town to the ground, and killed at least 1,152 people. The Peshtigo Fire Cemetery contains a memorial for the victims. The town's economy is based on forest products, including lumber, paper, and other wood products. Population (2010 census), 3,502.

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The small town of Peshtigo in northeastern Wisconsin was the site of one of the worst fires in American history, on Oct. 8, 1871. The fire went generally unnoticed outside the town because the famous Chicago fire occurred on the same day. The Peshtigo fire began as a forest fire.

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Gain instant access to this beautifully designed Unit on the Gold Rush, where kids will learn all about the process of Staking a Claim, Tools of the Trade, the Effects of the Gold Rush on the Environment, and much more. Access 3 different reading levels perfect for Grades 3-8.

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Between 1880 and 1920, almost 25 million people came to America from other countries. Most of these immigrants came from Europe. They came to escape terrible poverty in their own country, having often heard rumors that the streets of America were paved with gold. They believed that America was a land of opportunity. Unfortunately, immigrants poured into cities in such large numbers that there weren't enough resources to go around. Life was not easy for them.
Fun Facts

America's history has always been about immigration. The Puritans, among the first immigrants, came from Great Britain in search of religious freedom. During the first 200 years of our country's history, millions of immigrants came from Great Britain and Germany. Between 1846 and 1851, almost 1 million hungry people emigrated from Ireland during the Irish Potato Famine.

In the late 1800s, immigrants arrived from Poland, Russia, and Italy. Jews came fleeing religious persecution in Europe. In the West, Chinese immigrants flooded into California during the Gold Rush. More came to help build the transcontinental railroad. Chinese workers were willing to work for little pay, which made white workers angry. Whites worried that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs. Mobs and riots ensued; in 1882, Congress made Chinese immigration illegal. This law was repealed in 1943.

Most immigrants came to large cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. They had few skills and didn't speak English. They gathered together with others from their mother countries, creating Italian, Polish, and Jewish neighborhoods.

In cities, immigrants lived in crowded tenement buildings. In these crowded conditions, diseases like tuberculosis were common.

Middle-class Americans were unaware of the plight of the immigrants. Danish immigrant and photographer, Jacob Riis, published a book, "How the Other Half Lives," which shone a light on the problem.

Vocabulary

1. Tenement: an apartment or house that has been divided for many families; typically crowded and run-down

2. Tuberculosis: an infectious lung disease

3. Plight: a difficult or dangerous situation

Questions and Answers
Question: Did anyone help the immigrants?

Answer: Government agencies were slow to respond to the immigrants' needs. Individuals, churches, and private organizations jumped in to help. Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Here, volunteers taught women practical skills, such as sewing, cooking, shopping, and caring for the sick. Other agencies offered lessons in English or job skill training. The Salvation Army offered food and lodging.
Learn More
People still immigrate to America today. Visit Scholastic to learn more.

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Immigration to American in the 1800's - The Great American Dream

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Between 1880 and 1920, almost 25 million people came to America from other countries. Most of these immigrants came from Europe. They came to escape terrible poverty in their own country, having often heard rumors that the streets of America were paved with gold. They believed that America was a land of opportunity.

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The late 1800s to early 1900s were a time of hope and optimism as the middle class enjoyed greater prosperity and comfort than ever before. Yet, immigrant factory workers in New York City worked in dismal conditions just blocks from the mansions of wealthy factory owners, never taking part in the fruits of success.

Strikes were common as workers tried to gain better working conditions and higher pay, but employers were slow to respond. Safe conditions came at a high price - the lives of 146 factory workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Fun Facts

Russian immigrants, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, arrived in America with little money, but quickly prospered. Within 20 years, they owned one of the most well-known clothing factories in New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Here, factory workers made clothing, working 13 hour days for a paltry 13 cents per hour. Most of the workers were teenage girls, immigrants from Italy and Russia.

In 1910, the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory joined forces with hundreds of small factories, striking for better work conditions and higher pay. This was the largest strike of women workers the country had seen.

The owners, Harris and Blanck, struck back, hiring policemen to beat the women. Anne Morgan, daughter of banker, J.P. Morgan, was appalled by their treatment and organized protests with other wealthy New York women. The owners eventually agreed to shorter hours and better pay, but they did not improve working conditions.

On March 25, 1911, a fire started on the eigth floor of the factory. The owners escaped, but the workers on the ninth floor were unaware of the fire and kept working until smoke began billowing into their workspace.

A few workers were able to reach an elevator. Some of the workers climbed onto a fire escape, which crumpled under their weight, falling 100 feet to the ground below. The only other door was locked. As the fire engulfed the workroom, factory workers jumped out the windows to their deaths.

Of the 240 workers on the ninth floor, 146 perished. Over half of them were teenagers.

Vocabulary

1. Appalled: disgusted, shocked

2. Engulf: to completely enfold, surround, or consume

3. Shirtwaist: a button-down women's shirt that became fashionable in the early 20th century

Questions and Answers
Question: What happened to the factories after the fire?

Answer: After the fire, the public demanded safer factory conditions. The state of New York was among the first to pass legislation requiring that factory owners follow safety guidelines.
Learn More
Visit PBS to learn more about the Triangle Factory Fire.

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Facts About The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire - March 25th 1911

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The late 1800s to early 1900s were a time of hope and optimism as the middle class enjoyed greater prosperity and comfort than ever before. Yet, immigrant factory workers in New York City worked in dismal conditions just blocks from the mansions of wealthy factory owners, never taking part in the fruits of success.

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In 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in a river near Sacramento, California. He was building a saw mill for John Sutter. Although Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the find a secret, word quickly got out when Sam Brannon, a local shopkeeper, marched through town carrying a vial filled with gold flakes from Sutter's Mill.

Within a year, thousands of men poured into the area. Initially, they arrived from other places in the west, including Oregon and Hawaii. Over time, word spread to the eastern United States. Men left their homes and families to seek their fortunes.
Fun Facts

Between 1848 and 1849, the population of California grew by over 100,000.

Gold mining towns sprang up to take care of the miners. The towns had stores, saloons, and hotels. Few women and children lived here. The towns were often rough and lawless.

Over 750 pounds of gold were taken out of the ground during the California Gold Rush - more than $2 billion worth.

By the mid-1850s, the Gold Rush was over, but people still came to California. In 1850, California became the 31st

California wasn't the only place where people went looking for gold. Gold was discovered in Colorado in 1859, almost 10 years after the Colorado Gold Rush. Thousands of miners flocked to Colorado, creating the cities of Denver and Boulder, as well as smaller mining towns in the mountains. Some of these towns, like Idaho Springs and Central City, are still around. Others are ghost towns.

In 1896, three men discovered gold in a creek in Dawson, Canada, a remote area near Alaska. Few people knew about the discovery until a steamer ship arrived in Seattle carrying more than a ton of gold. Then, the Klondike Gold Rush started! More than 100,000 men began the journey to the Yukon, but only 30,000 made it. The journey was very difficult. Many died from starvation, illness, or injury along the way. Those that did make it found that most of the gold mines had been claimed.

Vocabulary

1. Saw mill: a factory capable of turning raw lumber into boards for building

2. Vial: a small tube or container, usually made of glass

3. Lawless: uncivilized, violent, without order

Questions and Answers
Question: Did a lot of people become rich looking for gold?

Answer: No. Most of the men who traveled to find gold ended up working for the men who owned the mines. Mining was hard, dangerous work and while these workers received fair wages, they certainly didn't become wealthy. Both men and women became wealthy by being savvy business owners. Instead of looking for gold, they set up hotels, dance halls, and other businesses needed by the miners.
Learn More
Visit Scholastic for a printable mini-book about the California Gold Rush.

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Fun Gold Rush Facts for Kids - American History

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In 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in a river near Sacramento, California. He was building a saw mill for John Sutter. Although Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the find a secret, word quickly got out when Sam Brannon, a local shopkeeper, marched through town carrying a vial filled with gold flakes from Sutter's Mill.