Hopes and dreams

Continue your family scrapbook.

The year is 1912.
It is the year the Titanic sinks.
It is the year Woodrow Wilson defeats William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene V. Debs to become the 28th President of the United States. It is the year New Mexico and Arizona enter the Union as the 47th and 48th states.

It is the year you are twelve.
Along with the waves of immigrants, thousands have moved from farms to take factory jobs.  If you are a child laborer, you face the urban realities of disease-ridden housing, poverty and dangerous working conditions.

There is a death in the family.
You realize that you have been going to school, reading about far-away, romantic places, but feeling like nothing will ever change.  Now someone close to you has been struck down by consumption, coryza or an epidemic like smallpox, yellow fever, polio or influenza. Describe or document this illness using the terminology of the times and information from "Health and Medicine, Funerals and Death."

You realize that now is the time to think about your own future.What will you do? Where will you go? How will you make a living?

There are great things happening in the world.
Motorcars and radios make distant places seem close. The Wright brothers ingenuity, Marie Curie's perseverance and Margaret Sanger's courage can serve as models. Using the overview,  timeline and people resources, find your inspirations.
Then write about your own hopes and dreams for the future.

Milk bottling assembly line (c. 1910-1930)
from Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Ford factory, first moving assembly line,
1913, Highland Avenue, Detroit, MI from
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920