Teaching about the Triangle Fire: Find selected educational resources, including lesson plans and online materials, as well as Triangle fire learning projects contributed by teachers and students.
Andi Sosin updates this page about teaching about the Triangle Fire and related topics. Please contact her or access the Triangle Open Archive (for online capture of documents, photos, audio or video) to submit artifacts and share resources; we’ll spread the word!
Click for:
Educational Websites & Lesson Plans
Books for Children & Young Adults
Student Presentations & Projects
Video Projects
Educational websites and Lesson Plans:
- The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) hosts an interactive online computer game called Don’t be a Zombie at Work to illustrate how occupational safety, health and environmental professionals are key to staying safe.
- The New York Times Learning Network. 100 Years Later: Examining the Impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, by SHANNON DOYNE, HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO and KATHERINE SCHULTEN, March 25, 2011.
- Learning Conversations With History: The Triangle Fire By Anne Campbell and Irene Rabinowitz. The UFT Teacher Center Professional Development Program. Special Edition. Vol 17. 2005–06. pp. 19-24. (5 MB pdf download; worth the wait)
- Fire in the Sky:The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Causes and Consequences by Christopher Czajka, online at the National Teacher Training Institute Channel 13 PBS keys to New York (Episode 4 of the Ric Burns Documentary) with media literacy activities to develop awareness of labor conditions and the causes and consequences of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
- Worker Safety – The Triangle Fire Legacy by Patricia Bonner. Council for Economic Education: An EconEdLink Online lesson. Includes worksheet activities and website resources. Link to an answer key is EconEd It Could Happen Today Worksheet AnswerKey
- The Triangle Fire: A Curriculum Guide. Washington Post Newspapers in Education. Interviews David Von Drehle with an activity about how important cutters were to the process of making shirtwaists (a 5MB pdf; worth the wait). Von Drehle appears on C-SPAN Booknotes in 2003.
- Social Science Docket. The New York and New Jersey State Councils for the Social Studies. Contains resources for teaching about Triangle. See also Vol. 4. No.1. Winter/Spring 2004. Theme: Work and Workers in New Jersey and New York.
- The Triangle Fire: From Industrialism to Progressivism by Joanne Reitano, La Guardia Community College CUNY; The American Social History Project: An Investigating US History module designed for use in the introductory college U.S. history survey course.
Books for Children & Young Adults:
- Uprising by Margaret P. Haddix (2007)
- Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch (2002)
- Fire!: The Beginnings of the Labor Movement by Barbara Goldin (1992)
- Factory Girl by Barbara Greenwood (2007)
- Hear My Sorrow: The Diary of Angela Denoto, a Shirtwaist Worker by Deborah Hopkinson (2004)
- The locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist fire by Suzanne Lieurance (2008)
- Fire at the Triangle Factory by Holly Littlefield (1996)
- The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (Graphic Library) by Jessica Gunderson (2006)
- Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy by Al Marrin (2011)
- Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History by Robin Kadison Berson (1994)
Student Presentations and Projects:
Many schools and teachers have engaged their students with inquiry learning projects about the Triangle fire. Presented here are some of the projects submitted to the Coalition, including videos, audio plays, photos of artifacts, and written documents.
Students from J. Taylor Finley Middle School in Huntington, NY traveled to Manhattan to participate in the the 101st commemoration of the Triangle Factory Fire. In order to qualify for the trip, students wrote essays explaining the events that preceded the fire and the impact the tragedy had on labor in America.
Hope High School in Providence RI produced a costume play that is headed to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Juan Morel Campus Schools participated in the Centennial. Here is a newsletter written by the students.
Maribeth 
Whitehouse, a teacher at IS 190, Bronx, NY sent photos from an 8th grade class project that linked the Triangle fire to the HappyLand fire of March 25, 1990. She says “Although there are obvious differences between the two events, there are many similarities like building code violations, the impact on immigrant populations and the huge loss of life (especially young people).” Here are photos of posters and writing by two of the students in the class.
Maribeth’s students have just created a new audio play, in which they conduct a rally as if it were 1909. Whitehouse Students imagine a 1909 Worker’s rally.
Maribeth and her students came to the Centennial ceremony on March 25, 2011. 
Here is a picture of a poster they made to remember the victims.
Video projects:
Teacher Caroline Roswell of PS 229 Queens led her students in an inquiry project that took them to the Evergreens Cemetery, where they presented their reports and read garment workers’ contemporaneous accounts of the Triangle fire at the unveiling of a memorial to the formerly unidentified and now known victims, at the Longman Memorial, on April 5, 2011.
Evergreen part 1
