"Progressive Era No. 2", Regents US History Short Essays

Product description

From the author

Progressive Era No. 2, Regents US History Short Essays This resource helps students develop historical document analysis skills for the New York State Regents-style US History tasks. The short essay tasks promote critical thinking by having students examine primary sources in context, identify relationships between events, analyze bias and reliability, and construct evidence-based arguments. The product contains two sets of stimulus-based short essay questions modeled on the state prototype. Each set includes primary source documents and accompanying prompts. Assigning these throughout the year is an effective way to prepare high school students for the skills tested on Part II of the Regents exam. Teachers can use the sets for individual practice or collaborative analysis during which students give each other feedback. A scoring rubric is provided; the PDF contains no model responses or answer key.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Describe the historical context surrounding a pair of primary source documents from the Progressive Era.
Explain a cause-and-effect, similarity/difference, or turning-point relationship between two historical documents.
Write a two-to-three-paragraph short essay well-supported by specific evidence from the source documents, per the included scoring rubric.

Teaching tips

Share the classroom scoring rubric with students before they write, since it specifies exactly what separates a descriptive response from an analytical one.
Review the cited primary-source URLs (Library of Congress, Hanover College) with students so they understand these are authentic historical documents rather than textbook summaries.
Provide separate essay paper. The rubric emphasizes historical context and document relationships; use additional criteria when assessing Set 2’s reliability analysis.

Skills covered

Primary source analysis -- students read excerpts from Jacob Riis's writing and period newspaper articles to identify historical context around Progressive Era labor conditions.
Document-based essay writing -- students write a two-to-three-paragraph essay establishing a cause-and-effect, similarity/difference, or turning-point relationship between two historical documents.
Source reliability evaluation -- in the second task variant, students analyze how a document's audience, purpose, or point of view affects its reliability as historical evidence.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

How do the two writing tasks differ?

The first asks students to explain historical context and a relationship between documents. The second asks them to consider how audience, purpose, bias, or perspective affects a source’s reliability.

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Resource details

Concepts & topics

Core concepts

Progressive Era
Primary source analysis
Document-based essay
Historical reliability

Topics

Progressive Era Regents US History Short essays Source analysis

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