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Please read pages 788 – 794 in Worlds of History, the Leeds Woolen Workers
Please read pages 788 – 794 in Worlds of History, the Leeds Woolen Workers’ Petition, and the excerpts from The Condition of the Working Class in England.
These three sources will give you an idea of what life was like for workers in these newly industrialized economies. Chronologically, the earliest source is the petition, which dates from 1786, close to the beginning of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It was written by a group of workers making wool cloth who were worried about how machinery was going to affect their jobs. Next, you have an excerpt from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was written in 1844. Engels would go on to develop the theories behind communism and socialism with Karl Marx, but at this point in his life he was living in Manchester, England helping manage a factory. As you read, you can start to see why he would have developed a dim view of capitalism, but don’t overlook the environmental issues he’s discussing either.
Finally, in Worlds of History, you have letters from a man named Oreste Sola, who was born in Italy and moved to Argentina, which was by far the most economically successful country in South America in the late nineteenth century. These letters are all from 1901 and in them he describes his experiences from when he arrived in Buenos Aires onward. Think about what it must have been like for him traveling thousands of miles from home and relocating to a foreign country to look for work.
If you want to start a thread, I want you to take all of these into account. You can even go further if you want: use the photos in the galleries or look for other sources, such as letters from the women who moved to Lowell for work. Try to explain what people thought about this new economic reality. Were they excited? Scared? Did they see it as positive or negative? I want to leave the topic pretty open because there’s a lot of things you can explore. Really think through these issues and try to explain what life would have been like at the time.
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