Where to Find Reliable Answers for the America The Story Of Us Cities Episode Worksheet
I teach U.S. history at a public high school, and this particular episode comes up every spring. The worksheet that goes with it has roughly 30 questions spanning the rise of industrial cities, immigration patterns, tenement housing, and the municipal reform movements of the late nineteenth century. Students either fill it out during class or as homework, and the answer key circulates online in a dozen different formats. Most of them are wrong in places. I have learned to check everything against the episode itself before giving it to anyone. The episode runs about forty-five minutes. It opens with Philadelphia and Boston, moves through the railroad cities like Chicago and St. Louis, then hits the industrial centers of the Rust Belt, and finishes with the immigrant neighborhoods and city halls of the Gilded Age. The worksheet follows that same sequence. The easiest way to build your own answer sheet is to keep a separate document open and pause after each major segment to write down the specifics. This takes about twenty minutes per viewing, and it is more reliable than copying a posted key. Here is how the core section breaks down if you need a quick reference. The early questions deal with urban growth before the Civil War. Philadelphia had around two hundred thousand residents by 1860, and Boston was already operating a sophisticated streetcar system. The Chicago section focuses on grain elevators and the Union Stock Yards. Detroit appears briefly in connection with early manufacturing rather than automobiles. Pittsburgh gets coverage for steel production and the rise of the labor movement. New York City dominates the later portion, especially the Lower East Side and the Tammany Hall political machine.
One thing most posted keys miss is the emphasis the episode places on transportation infrastructure as the primary driver of urban growth. The narrated segments repeatedly return to canals, rail lines, and later streetcar suburbs. If your worksheet includes questions about why certain cities grew faster than others, the answers all trace back to rail or water access, not just manufacturing presence. I lost a whole class period once trying to grade a worksheet where students had written that Cleveland grew primarily because of steel. It was grain and meatpacking. The show makes that clear in the middle section, but it is easy to skim over. The immigrant neighborhood questions tend to produce the most variance in student answers. The episode shows Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side with a lot of specific detail. Names of streets, buildings, and organizations matter here. The worksheet often asks for the name of the settlement house movement figure featured, which is Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago. Some keys mistakenly say Boston or New York. The tenement reform questions reference the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which required fire escapes, indoor plumbing, and minimum window sizes. The episode shows the before and after photos from the New York City model dwelling movement. I ran into a specific problem last year when a student brought me a downloaded answer key that claimed the Populist Party emerged from urban labor gatherings in New York City. That is completely wrong. The Populist movement was agrarian and centered in the Midwest and South. The worksheet does not actually ask about the Populists directly, but a few questions about the Gilded Age political machine lead students toward that confusion if they read one of the bad keys. The correct connection the episode makes is between urban political machines like Tammany and the broader patronage system, not agrarian protest movements. I ended up having students watch the second half of the episode twice because the first pass was so muddled by the wrong key they were using.
Another detail that catches people up is the episode's treatment of municipal ownership of utilities. It spends time on the push for publicly owned streetcar systems and water works. Several questions on the worksheet reference this, and most online answers skip past it entirely. If your version asks who controlled the street railways in most cities before reform efforts, the answer is private companies, often owned by out-of-state or European investors. The reform movement wanted them municipalized. That distinction matters for the short answer sections. There is a downloadable PDF version of the official worksheet available through the PBS LearningMedia site if you search for the episode title and worksheet. It is free with a teacher account. The official answer key on that platform is accurate but somewhat sparse. I supplemented it by building my own list using screenshots from the episode timed to each question number. That took me about four hours the first time, but once I had it, I reused it for three years. The total number of questions across the standard version is usually between twenty-eight and thirty-two, depending on which publisher's variant your school uses. If you are a student trying to verify your own answers, here are a few quick corrections that come up repeatedly. The episode does not say that San Francisco was the fastest growing city in the episode, even though it gets airtime for the Gold Rush. That credit belongs to Chicago in the specific context of the post-Civil War period covered. The cartoonist referenced in the political machine segment is Thomas Nast, who drew for Harper's Weekly. Some keys say Mark Twain, which is wrong. The streetcar magnate mentioned is Huntington, specifically Collis P. Huntington, connected to the Southern Pacific Railroad and California urban development. The chapter on skyscrapers names the Home Insurance Building in Chicago as the first, designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1885.
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The worksheet also includes a couple of map-based questions that require students to identify cities by location and industry. If you are stuck, the episode itself displays a map sequence around the twenty-minute mark that labels the major cities and their primary industries during the period. I tell students to pause there and copy the labels rather than guess. It saves about ten minutes of back-and-forth and eliminates the most common errors. The sequence covers Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati with quick labels for grain, meatpacking, steel, and textiles. I will be honest about what this material cannot fix. If your worksheet version has been heavily adapted by a textbook publisher, the question order and some of the specific phrasing may not match the PBS episode exactly. In those cases, no answer key online will line up perfectly. You have to cross-reference question by question. I have seen variants where the tenement question comes before the labor question instead of after, which flips the expected answer sequence. Always check the question numbers against your copy, not against a posted key organized differently. For the essay or short response portion, the episode provides two strong angles that most keys do not highlight enough. The first is the trade-off between rapid urban growth and public health. The episode shows cholera outbreaks and the subsequent development of municipal water systems. The second is the relationship between immigration and political machine power. Both of these connect to larger themes about governance, and the best answers will mention the transition from volunteer fire companies to municipal fire departments and from poll taxes to civil service exams. Those details show up in the final ten minutes and are frequently tested.
The full worksheet and official materials are hosted on the PBS LearningMedia website under the America The Story Of Us collection. You can find the Cities episode by searching the series page and selecting the companion resources tab. The PDF download is labeled with the episode number and running time. There is no separate official answer key PDF that I have been able to locate, which is why building your own from the episode is the most dependable approach. I have shared my compiled list with colleagues at department meetings, and we usually spend about an hour going through it to catch any drift between editions.
