Purpose: To help students connect history to what people believe today.
Directions: Find four different people who are not in our class. Ask them why some people are poor. Our poverty rate, in the US, runs around 10%, on average. Try to discover what they think causes this phenomenon. The second part is to connect what the people you talked with are saying to what people have believed in history, as described in chapter 6. For example, if people say, “Folks don’t want to work because they are receiving money from the government,” this sounds like The Spleenhamland System which gave people money and caused some people to work less. See if you connect what people are saying to laws and movements that were mentioned in our text.
Write up a summary of the responses and the connections to history in a ¾ page paper.