New York's Newsboys

New York's Newsboys
Author: Karen M. Staller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190886609

New York's Newsboys tells the engaging tale of how social reformer Charles Loring Brace and his colleagues built New York's Children's Aid Society (CAS) in the nineteenth century. Seizing on the idea of using "newsies" -- boys who hawked penny newspapers on the city streets -- to promote his new charity, Brace saw the kids as symbolic of the rapidly increasing population of uneducated immigrant youth roaming the streets, eking out a subsistence living under dire conditions. The newsies were both heralded as shrewd entrepreneurs and feared as potential members of the "dangerous class." To New York's wealthy class, Brace touted the benefits of helping these children while warning of the social and political dangers of neglecting them. Attacked during his life for his dangerous ideas and bold actions, among Brace's earliest experiments was the Newsboys' Lodging House (NBLH), opened in 1853. The NBLH quickly grew beyond providing for the lodgers' basic needs into a well-rounded social service program offering education, vocational training, health care, employment referrals, and other services. Its policies and practices were forged from staff interactions with the earliest lodgers, colorful characters like the Professor, Fatty, Valise, and Dutchy. By 1855, NBLH efforts were yoked to other branches of CAS service, through its Central Office, including the controversial emigration branch (known as the "orphan trains"). Using primary documents and analysis of over 700 original CAS case records, Extra offers a new look at the foundational roots of social work and child welfare in the United States. It makes broad claims about the breadth and depth of CAS efforts, arguing that its significance to the history of the profession, the city of New York, and the country has been under appreciated. Charles Loring Brace laid down the foundations for progressive era reformers in areas as wide ranging as child welfare, juvenile justice, public education, and public health; his efforts hold lessons for today's social justice workers who face challenges similar to those of mid-nineteenth century New York.

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
Author: Paul Boyer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 1992-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 067426231X

For over a century, dark visions of moral collapse and social disintegration in American cities spurred an anxious middle class to search for ways to restore order. In this important book, Paul Boyer explores the links between the urban reforms of the Progressive era and the long efforts of prior generations to tame the cities. He integrates the ideologies of urban crusades with an examination of the careers and the mentalities of a group of vigorous activists, including Lyman Beecher; the pioneers of the tract societies and Sunday schools; Charles Loring Brace of the Children's Aid Society; Josephine Shaw Lowell of the Charity Organization movement; the father of American playgrounds, Joseph Lee; and the eloquent city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. Boyer describes the early attempts of Jacksonian evangelicals to recreate in the city the social equivalent of the morally homogeneous village; he also discusses later strategies that tried to exert a moral influence on urban immigrant families by voluntarist effort, including, for instance, the Charity Organizations' "friendly visitors." By the 1890s there had developed two sharply divergent trends in thinking about urban planning and social control: the bleak assessment that led to coercive strategies and the hopeful evaluation that emphasized the importance of environmental betterment as a means of urban moral control.

Catalogue of Printed Books

Catalogue of Printed Books
Author: British Museum. Dept. of Printed Books
Publisher: William Clowes & Sons, Limited
Total Pages: 652
Release: 1885
Genre: Reference
ISBN:

The Sun and the Moon

The Sun and the Moon
Author: Matthew Goodman
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786726962

On August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the Sun brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles reported the existence of life on the moon -- including unicorns, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks it was the most broadly circulated newspaper story of the era, and the Sun, a working-class upstart, became the most widely read paper in the world. An exhilarating narrative history of a divided city on the cusp of greatness, and tale of a crew of writers, editors, and charlatans who stumbled on a new kind of journalism, The Sun and the Moon tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made America a nation of newspaper readers.

Child Protection in America

Child Protection in America
Author: John E.B. Myers
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Total Pages: 751
Release: 2024-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN:

Child abuse and neglect are tragically common. Each year, more than 1,000 American children die due to maltreatment. Thousands more suffer physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. Across the country, every community has a system of government-operated and funded child protective services (CPS). But given that social workers of CPS have the authority to remove children from unsafe parents, it is no surprise that CPS is controversial. Does CPS protect children? Does CPS do more good than harm? Is CPS fundamentally racist, as some critics argue? Should CPS be abolished? To answer these questions, it is essential to understand the origins of child protection in America. How did we arrive at the child protection system in place today? This book traces the history of child protection from colonial times to the present and provides the most in-depth analysis ever published of the origins of child protection.