American history
A Regents-style short-essay assessment presents two sets of primary-source documents on labor and immigration during the Progressive Era -- an excerpt from Jacob Riis's 'How the Other Half Lives,' a 1902 newspaper bulletin, an 1886 newspaper article, and a Pullman Strikers' statement -- and asks students to write a two-to-three-paragraph essay analyzing the historical context and the cause-and-effect, similarity/difference, or turning-point relationship between the documents. A second version of the task asks students instead to analyze one document's reliability by considering its audience, purpose, or bias. A classroom rubric with three performance levels mapped to scores from 55 to 100 defines what separates a primarily descriptive essay from one that is 'richly' analytical and well-supported by the documents. The resource includes the task prompts, source citations, and rubric, but no student model essay or answer key in this download. Teachers assembling a full year of Regents-style document analysis can pair this with the Alien and Sedition Acts primary source analysis , which applies the same close-reading and reliability-evaluation skills to Federalist-era documents from 1798.