Question 1:
Consider the accounts of working conditions for industrial laborers presented in the assigned texts from Friedrich Engels and Andrew Ure. Whose account do you find more believable, and why?
Question 2:
The assigned parts of the sociological study Middletown by Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd present a picture of “modern” American society undergoing dramatic transformation in the late 1920s as the result of technological and business innovations, causing considerable worry and disapproval among some observers at the time. What developments in contemporary global society — that is, in the world we live in now, almost one hundred years later — do you see as fundamentally analogous to the innovations discussed in Middletown, and why?
