the american dream IN THE GAPE

The Model Town of Pullman: Remaking Political Imagination in the Industrial Age
by Jeffrey Helgeson, Texas State University
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By the 1890s, Americans had engaged in three decades of conflict over the direction of a newly industrial society. Throughout the period, conflict between workers and employers grew and evolved in character. This was a period of extraordinary economic growth that Americans experienced as a crisis for the future of the nation and its democratic experiment. The questions we have to ask ourselves are: Why did they experience this time of growth as a crisis for democracy and how did they respond? In the late 1800s, people were arguing over the meanings of industrialization and urbanization in terms of quite old ways of thinking about power. Their ideas were rooted in the world of feudalism—of kings and peasants, a time of almost no economic growth and only the most gradual of change. The Civil War, emancipation, industrialization, mass European immigration, and dramatic legal change had opened doors they could not shut. Rather than a world of kings and peasants, Americans would need to learn to understand power in terms of contract law, private corporations, court injunctions against labor unions, workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain with their employers as a group, and African Americans’ struggles for labor and civil rights.
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Key Questions || Bibliography
Artistic Responses to the Gilded Era: Morris, Iannelli, and Torres
Lesson by Lisa Evans, University Laboratory High School

By examining the work of three GAPE-era artists (Morris, Iannelli, and Torres), students will glimpse the historical tensions, economic opportunities, and challenges faced by artists/designers of the period.

The British artist, philosopher, and socialist William Morris founded the Arts and Crafts movement as a response to the inhuman working conditions of the Industrial Age and the poor design of the mass-manufactured objects of the Victorian era. Morris believed that individual human craftsmanship made both happier workers and better products. His aesthetic and political philosophies were influential even in the United States, and his philosophies and products (textiles and wallpapers) were adopted by progressives with means—including key social reformers such as Jane Addams. But meeting his exacting standards of individually crafted products meant his prices were beyond the means of the middle class. Although Morris was financially successful, he and his followers could never compete economically with mass manufacturing.

Subsequent artists, including Alfonso and May Iannelli, were inspired by the opportunities, forms, and innovations of the Industrial Age. They moved away from natural forms and the handmade to embrace the geometry of the machine age, applying these theories to graphic and product designs and creating a new visual vocabulary for the era.  

The unfortunate by-products of the industrial era (waste and obsolescence) were the materials of a new generation of artists, as exemplified by the immigrant ceramic artist Jesus Torres, who worked out of Jane Addams’s settlement, Hull-House. At Hull-House the arts and crafts were used to build community amongst the immigrant community as well as to create income opportunities for migrants. Torres used his ceramics knowledge in his collaboration with Chicagoans Miller and Kogan to renovate dilapidated urban housing, creating vibrant examples of Mexican Modernism from largely scavenged materials.  

Students will examine slides of the artifacts to discern the socioeconomic influences that shaped the art and discuss. Studio art activities include the creation of a relief print emphasizing repetition, pattern, and simplification of shape and color. Mathematics students will analyze the prints and identify geometric relationships and vocabulary. Finally, students will write a reflection.

​Lesson Plan || Slides
Black Outside: Recreation and Race in the Land of the Free
Lesson by Heather Ingram, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy

During the first wave of what came to be known as The Great Migration, 17-year-old Eugene Williams swam across Chicago’s racial divide and was greeted with rocks; his subsequent drowning and lack of police intervention sparked the Race Riot of 1919. Earlier that summer, in response to a series of assaults on black people by white mobs,  noted educator and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett remarked, “[I]t looks very much like Chicago is trying to rival the South in its race hatred against the Negro. … Will no action be taken to prevent these lawbreakers until further disaster has occurred?” Just twenty days later, Williams would be dead--the Windy City in the midst of a racial reckoning. By exploring this layered moment in American history (The Gilded Age and Progressive Era) through the lens of race (as a social construct) and recreation, students will consider the socio-emotional benefits of leisurely activities and engagement with the natural world, while contemplating the personal and political impact when such sacred space is desecrated. Utilizing Wells-Barnett’s seminal text, The Red Record, as our anchor and other informational readings, literary work, and contemporary media as supplementary material, students will explore recreational activities as spaces of unwarranted violence, land theft, radical resistance, and transformative joy.

Leaning heavily upon topics and texts discussed during the 2023 NEH Summer Institute, Black Outside: Race and Recreation in the Land of the Free represents a rethinking of this pivotal moment in American history. In particular, GAPE conversations about the Great Migration, the Anti-Lynching Movement, and John Muir’s conservation efforts pointed me toward this lesson’s complicated subject matter. Also of note, current pedagogical theories regarding the need to infuse our curricula with joy helped shape student-centered tasks and assessments.
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Lesson Plan