Gilded Age

Provided by: C3 Teachers |Published on: December 6, 2025

Lesson Plans

Synopsis

In this lesson plan from C3 Teachers, students will explore the political, social, and economic forces that shaped industrialization during the Gilded Age through primary sources.
Students will answer the question, “Is greed good?” demonstrating their understanding and defending their claim through the creation of political cartoons, posters, or essays.
This inquiry will take students at least 2-4 40-minute class periods.

Related Teaching Resources

Subjects: Economics, History

Authors: C3 Teachers

Region: United States

Languages: English

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Teaching Materials

Positives

This resource provides rich primary sources, guiding students to analyze multiple perspectives from the Gilded Age.
The staged questions and performance tasks support strong historical thinking and help students build toward an evidence-based argument.

Prerequisites

Students should be familiar with basic concepts such as industrialization, capitalism, and immigration prior to beginning the inquiry.
Teachers may want to review the roles of trusts, monopolies, and labor unions, as these terms appear in several featured sources.
This lesson provides suggestions and a general outline, but teachers will need to plan the structure of the inquiry themselves.

Differentiation & Implementation

Teachers can provide graphic organizers to help students compare positive and negative aspects of industrialization across the featured sources.
Many of the primary sources include text that struggling readers may find challenging. These students may benefit from having vocabulary introduced ahead of time, reading the text as a class, or having the text broken into manageable chunks.
To connect learning to the present, teachers may guide students in a brief discussion of modern wealth inequality before beginning the Taking Informed Action task.
To make connections to climate change, teachers can guide students in a data exploration to determine how industrialization and associated greed have increased fossil fuel emissions. This interactive map is a helpful tool for exploring this and other historical influences on the environment.
Teachers can use this resource to make connections to some of the Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth. Students can discuss how achieving this goal can sometimes put us at odds with achieving goals like SDG 13, Climate Action.

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About the Partner Provider

C3 Teachers

C3 Teachers aims to empower teachers as they wrestle with the big ideas and instructional implications of the C3 Framework. Teachers play a critical role in helping students learn academic content using the C3 Inquiry Arc, which outlines the social studies habits of mind, disciplinary tools, and conceptual content that students need to become ready for college and career, and most importantly, civic life. As social studies students map their own disciplinary inquiries, C3 Teachers embark on a pedagogical investigation examining and experimenting with their own practice as they support students’ questions, learn, apply, analyze, collaborate, express, and act in authentic social studies experiences. C3teachers.org is a place to learn more about that process and to share your experiences with other social studies teachers.

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