Homestead Strike: Analyzing an interview with Henry Frick
Subject • Grade 7

Selected segments with commentary below » Full video viewable here.

This clip features 7th grade students engaged in close reading and interpretation of a primary historical source: an interview with Henry Frick about his actions related to the strike at the Homestead Factory. The students interrogate Frick’s language, raising questions about his reliability and bias. One student wonders if “Henry Frick is actually trying to make himself look like he's not really a monster.” Another student highlights the improbability that the men could have fired for 25 minutes and only hit 3 men, and another corroborated the Frick account with the first document by Emma Goldman. Still another student wondered if perhaps Frick’s explanation for why the company decreased the wages was reasonable, given that they had invested in machinery that would increase efficiency.

All these comments indicate a high level of engagement and a sophisticated degree of textual analysis. The teacher did not need to do much to foster student discourse here.

Up to this point, students were sharing their observations and insights about the document. Here, the teacher tries to bring their observations together and polls the class about which document they find more reliable. The students, impressively, recognize that neither document can be considered fully reliable. The teacher highlights this confusion and normalizes it. This moment is a perfect encapsulation of what it could look like to bring students into the uncertainty of historical inquiry. We can never fully recreate the past and often the contradictory nature of the available evidence will deepen our uncertainty before it clears it. 

The teacher here invites students to imagine what additional evidence would support them to clear up their confusion. This move helps orient students to the work of inquiry, of seeking additional information when they have unresolved questions. The teacher suggests that a neutral perspective would resolve the tension, but what’s left unsaid is that there are no purely neutral perspectives in history. What might come close to presenting all sides would be a reputable secondary source on the Homestead Strike, because historians attempt to consider all the available evidence before arriving at a conclusion. But even in that case, it would not be a neutral account.  

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