Teacher Notes

Description

After reading three primary source documents, students independently write an essay or have a class discussion using included guiding questions.

Duration (approximate): 1 1/2 class periods

Learning Outcomes and Skills

1. Students realize that dyeing -- both as a process and as a good to be sold -- took place in an international economic context. Americans, both before and after the development of synthetic dyes, bought dyestuff from foreign countries.

2. Students learn that the degree of US government interference in science depends upon the politics and economics of the time.

3. Students learn that unlike the techniques of natural dyeing, the ability to develop synthetic dyes was not evenly distributed throughout the world. Consequently, countries found in synthetic dyes a competitive advantage in international trade. Prior to World War I, for example, Germany produced a large majority of the world's supply of dyes and dyestuffs.

4. Students will learn that economic warfare (blockades, trade restrictions) played a significant role in World War I.

5. Students will practice using primary source documents as historical evidence.

What To Do

- Give students copies of the primary sources (listed below) and the Student Handout to read.
- The questions listed on the Student Handout could be used as the basis for an essay or a group discussion.

What You Will Need

Student Activity Packets which include:

Copy of excerpt from Excerpt from Asa Ellis, The Country Dyer's Assistant . (Brookfield, Massachusetts: E. Merriam & Co., 1798).

Copy of "Back to Vegetable Dye," Literary Digest (May 16 1916).

Copy of excerpt from Elene Foster, "The Color Situation," New York: The National Aniline & Chemical Company,1919.

Copy of "Dyeing in an International Context -- An Essay Assignment"

Key Points / Notes on The Primary Sources

- This exercise shows students that dyeing -- both as a process and as a good to be sold -- took place in an international economic context. Dyeing was one of the several segments of the textile industry that brought America into international markets. Americans, both before and after the development of synthetic dyes, bought dyestuff from foreign countries.

- For Asa Ellis, writing after the Revolutionary War, developing an American dye industry meant gaining economic independence from foreign trading partners. Significantly, Ellis' vision of an American dye industry involves utilizing native plants (Ellis gives several examples) as dyestuff sources.

- The excerpt from the Literary Digest, written during World War I, indicates that during times of international conflict, when Americans could not rely on imported synthetic dyes, the dye industry turned to local dye stuffs once again.

- "The Color Situation" was a pamphlet (the original of which is in the Garvan Papers at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming) published in 1919 just as American chemical firms were ready to spend substantial amounts of money to begin the production of synthetic dyes, an effort based on German patents seized by the U.S. government as the spoils of World War I. Indeed, the Chemical Foundation, set up by the government to manage those German patents and headed by Francis Garvan, had by 1919 already begun the process of selling the patents to firms like Du Pont and the National Aniline & Chemical Company. These firms were very much interested in tariff protection against the same German industry whose patents provided the scientific foundation of the new American initiative. So at least some of that "unremitting toil" of laboratory chemists that Foster describes was performed by German scientists.

To Student Activity Packet