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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

Five Points: New York's Irish Working Class in the 1850s

New York’s Five Points, the most notorious urban slum of the antebellum period, is seen through the conflicting perspectives of a native-born Protestant reformer and an immigrant Irish-Catholic family. Members of the Mulvahill family describe daily life in a complicated neighborhood, contradicting nineteenth-century stereotypes about the immigrant poor. (Length: 30 minutes)

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Teaching Materials

Viewer’s Guide (.pdf)

See collection of essay, documents, and teaching activities in HERB

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