Mohandas Gandhi had a major impact on his country's development. Write an essay that describes Gandhi's goals for India, how he set out to achieve those goals and how his philosophy reflected both Indian and western traditions.
Writing for Social Studies Assessment
Directions:
Write a brief essay on the topic below using the documents as evidence. Be sure to consider the point of view of the writer who created each document.
Your essay should include three parts:
(1) an introduction that states your main point,
(2) a body that develops your main point and offers evidence from the documents and your knowledge of American history, and
(3) a conclusion that restates your main point. Include specific historical details and use information from the documents.
Essay topic:
In the late 1800s, the United States economy was changed by new inventions, remarkably rapid growth, and new forms of transportation and communication. What benefits did these changes bring about? What problems did they cause?
Document 1:
Historian Sandy Lydon, describing the lives of Chinese immigrants who worked on California railroads, in Chinese Gold (1985)
"Between 1875 and 1880 the Chinese built three separate railroads, laid forty-two miles of track, and drilled 2.6 miles of tunnels to stitch
Santa Cruz County together and attach it permanently to the world beyond the Santa Cruz Moun-tains. The Chinese contributed not only their sweat and their muscle, but their lives. At least fifty Chinese were killed in accidents while building those railroads .
Chinese railroad workers on the Santa Cruz Railroad worked six ten-hour days a week and were paid one dollar a day. Two dollars per week [were] deducted from their pay for food, while expenses such as clothing and recreation chipped away at the remaining four dollars."
Document 2:
Andrew Carnegie, describing the beginnings of the American steel industry , in an essay (1901)
"As late as 1810 there were produced in the whole country only 917 tons of steel. . . . It was not [until] 1864, when the last century was almost two-thirds gone, that the revolution in steel manufacture came to us, and the Iron Age began to give way to the new King Steel, for our first Bessemer steel was made in that notable year, and steel [that earlier had cost] from six to seven cents per pound for ordinary grades has since sold at less than one cent per pound.
There is one element of cost, however, . . . that has not been [reduced], and that is human labor. [Wages have] risen and the tendency is to higher earnings per man."