Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What was the Industrial Revolution? How did this period of dramatic social and economic change impact the American way of life?

Teaching Suggestion: You may decide to provide your students with these links to explore as part of their prereading homework assignments, assign them computer lab time for the same purpose, or bring up these resources on a smart board or other projection system in your classroom. Many students will have a familiarity with this period in history, but perhaps not the ways in which it directly pertains to the events of Lyddie.

• “The American Era of Child Labor”: This page from the Social Welfare History Project provides a historical overview of child labor in the United States from the Industrial Revolution through the 1920s. Primary sources on the page include several photographs and a political cartoon.
• Timeline of the History of Lowell: This timeline, produced by the Lowell Historical Society, covers the history of the city beginning in the 17th century, but the portion cataloguing the 19th century can be especially valuable for providing students with a chronological context for Lyddie.