Researching Adolescent Immigrant History

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photographic print, Young Greek Shoe-Shiners, April 1912, Lewis Wickes Hine, LO
Question

I am a geography teacher in Los Angeles, CA. I want to teach about immigration to California from other countries to my 9th-grade students. Most of my students either have immigrant parents or are immigrants themselves. Do you have any suggestions as to where I can find resources about teen or child immigrants throughout history?

Answer

It’s great to hear that students are learning geography and I like your idea of using immigration, past and present, to help them learn this subject. A focus on children and teens only makes the plan more exciting, and I hope you find some resources that will fit your teaching goals and context in the set below.

California History Online

You may want to start with the go-to site for teaching K–12 California history, Calisphere. This site, produced by the California Digital Library at the University of California Libraries, has essays, texts, and images relevant to the history of California and its place in regional, national, and international events. Browse their collection on immigration here.
Search the site using the key phrase ”child immigrant” and you get hundreds of results including texts and images. Learn more about four groups, including African Americans and Hispanic Americans, by starting on their page, “California Cultures.”

Also check out the Library of Congress’s American Memory sites, California As I Saw It: California, 1849–1900 or Chinese in California, 1850–1925. At the latter site, one of the things you can find through an “immigration” search are official “certificates of residence.” Using one of these can provoke all kinds of questions from students and enable making connections to the present.

Focus on Children and Immigration

Additional potentially useful sites that address this topic include:

Print and Community Resources

Off-line, you may want to check out Phillip Hoose’s book, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History. Here you will find short essays about specific young people in the past, both the famous and more obscure.

And don’t forget to check out your local museums, libraries, and independent bookstores. Often they have local history collections and programs that can help you make history come alive!

Good luck!

Little Cowpuncher: Rural School Newspaper of Southern Arizona

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Drawing, Ciara, From Little Cowpuncher, Redington School, November 20, 1932
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A work in progress, this site presents the southern Arizona school newspaper, Little Cowpuncher. Created by Anglo and Mexican American ranch children, from kindergarten through 8th grade, between 1932 and 1943 at five neighboring Arizona schools (Redington, Baboquivari, Sasco, San Fernando, and Sopori), the newspapers present the original and unedited stories, poems, and illustrations of students about their community and school life. The site includes a map that identifies the location of the five schools and users may select which newspaper they wish to examine by school and by year.

The newspapers include many stories about holiday celebrations, especially Halloween and Christmas. Also frequently featured are tales of rodeo activities and issues dedicated to graduating classmates. Other local events, such as an outbreak of chicken pox and droughts offer a unique perspective on the students' isolated rural lives.

Although the site is simply designed, middle and high school students and teachers will find that the newspapers present an opportunity to study pioneer Mexican and American ranch families and understand the bilingual and bicultural communities they created in Southern Arizona.

American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series I, 1760-1900

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Logo, Readex
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This subscription-only website presents an extensive archive of documents relevant to early U.S. history, offering full-color facsimile images of approximately 30,000 broadsides and ephemera. Advertisements, campaign literature, poems, juvenile literature, and Civil War envelopes comprise the bulk of the collection, making the archive especially valuable for those interested in early American consumer culture, political campaigns, and literary life. The collection also contains rich information on slavery, Native American relations, and local events—plays, gatherings, and religious events.

Users can browse the archive by category: Genre, Subjects, Author, History of Printing, Place of Publication, and Language. Simple and advanced searches are available, enabling easy access into this large collection of documents. For those with access, this site provides an extensive resource for researching 18th- and 19th-century North America.

Girls’ Labor and Leisure in the Progressive Era

Question

Why is girlhood historically significant in this era?

Textbook Excerpt

The central focus of U.S. textbook chapters on the Progressive era is the historical agency of reformers who expanded public education, reformed industry, and organized to abolish child labor. Textbooks focus on adults more than children and on boys more than girls.

Source Excerpt

The sources show that Progressive reformers focused primarily on the “boy problem” as the major social crisis facing American cities. Sources reveal the anxieties of adults as well as the agency of girls who worked for wages, organized strikes, played on city streets, contributed to household economies, and participated in American society.

Historian Excerpt

Historians studying the Progressive era have examined the nature of reform, reformers, and those they sought to reform. They found that the middle-class notions reformers held about womanhood, childhood, and girlhood conflicted with the beliefs of immigrant working-class parents, as well as with the ideas and practices of a new generation of young people.

Abstract

The historical agency of adult reformers and the issues they championed in regard to children—principally child labor and education—are the focus of most textbook chapters on the Progressive era. However, shifting the focus to the labor and leisure of Progressive-era girls complicates the picture of adult do-gooders helping vulnerable “have nots.” Capable girls contributed to the growth of their families, communities, and country by producing goods, consuming commodities, and organizing workers. In the process, girls defied traditional gendered beliefs nurtured by immigrant parents and the ideals of girlhood fostered by middle-class reformers. Although both parents and Progressives sought to contain “wayward girls,” immigrant and urban working-class girls who embraced new commercial entertainments created a vibrant subculture that transformed American culture and society in the 20th century.

Television News of the Civil Rights Era

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Image for Television News of the Civil Rights Era
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was covered on news stations around the country. This website provides 230 of these video clips from two local television stations in Roanoke, Virginia. Clips feature both national events, such as the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, as well as footage of local school desegregation, protests, and interviews on the street.

Accompanying this footage are 14 oral histories (several from Virginians with firsthand knowledge of the Prince Edward Public Schools closing), and 23 documents that chronicle the official development of Massive Resistance in Virginia, in particularly the involvement of Senator Harry F. Byrd. "Essays and Interpretation" provides important historical context and analysis, with detailed pieces on "Virginia's Massive Resistance to School Desegregation" and the development of television news coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia and Mississippi.

Colonial Williamsburg

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Photo, Asynchronous Fashion Photography Interactive, Colonial Williamsburg.
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Intended to promote tourism to Colonial Williamsburg, this website is also rich in educational resources. Visitors may "Experience the Life" by selecting one of 12 categories, ranging from animals to food to the African-American Experience; and will find information and resources about each topic. For example, visitors can learn about colonial clothing for men, women, and children. There is a paper doll game where players must assemble the various layers of colonial clothing in the proper order. Selecting the link "See the Places" allows users to virtually visit 27 buildings, including the prison (Public Gaol), the Capitol, and eight colonial sites, including Market Square and Duke of Gloucester Street. "Meet the People" allows visitors to learn about prominent Williamsburg natives, such as the Randolph family, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry; or meet more diverse groups, like African Americans or colonial children.

The "Teacher Resource" section allows educators to virtually tour Colonial Williamsburg or learn about the science of mapping colonial America. It also provides 18 lesson plans for exploring such topics as the colonial reaction to the Stamp Act or the murder trial of Abigail Briggs. Listen to the audio review:.

Children's Books Online

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Illustration, Pinkie says good-bye, Margaret Clayton, From Bunny Brothers
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This website's library offers full versions of more than 700 classic children's books indexed by age/interest reading levels (pre-readers and very early readers, early readers, intermediate readers, advanced readers, and adult readers). Such classic tales as Jack and the Beanstalk, Mother Goose, Three Blind Mice, Tom Thumb, The Ugly Duckling, Peter Rabbit, Puss in Boots, The Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Pinocchio are available on the site.

A number of the books are available in multiple languages. The site's Eye in the Ear section offers audio tracks accompanying select children's books. And its Super Index offers a full listing of the available stories, poems, rhymes, book chapters, and illustrations. For those researching children or children's literature, this site is a treasure trove.

Child Labor in America, 1908-1912: Photographs of Lewis W. Hine

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Image for Child Labor in America, 1908-1912: Photographs of Lewis W. Hine
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Furnishes 64 photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine (1874–1940) between 1908 and 1912. Images document American children working in mills, mines, streets, and factories, and as "newsies," seafood workers, fruit pickers, and salesmen. The website also includes photographs of immigrant families and children's "pastimes and vices."

Original captions by Hine—one of the most influential photographers in American history—call attention to exploitative and unhealthy conditions for laboring children. A background essay introduces Hine and the history of child labor in the United States. This is a valuable collection for studying documentary photography, urban history, labor history, and the social history of the Progressive era.

Laboring to Bring Forth Child Labor Statistics

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boy laborer in cranberry bog 1938
Question

How many children under 16 were employed in 1940?

Answer

The short answer is this: If you mean full-time work (with certain exceptions) ―none were employed, at least legally.

This was the result of the signing into law in 1938 (two years before) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Wake Forest University Economics Professor Robert Whaples puts it succinctly: "the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 prohibited the full-time employment of those 16 and under (with a few exemptions) and enacted a national minimum wage which made employing most children uneconomical." Whaples describes the various reasons, apart from the enactment of federal, state, and local laws, why the numbers of children working in industry and on the farm had already declined dramatically over the first few decades of the 20th century before the passage of the Act.

The provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that dealt with child labor stated: "No employer shall employ any oppressive child labor in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce or in any enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce."

The FLSA, as further defined by statute, prohibited children under 16 from any kind of employment in certain hazardous kinds of work. The Secretary of Labor has periodically revised such categories of hazardous work. For agricultural work, for example, those under 16 should not be employed in operating a tractor of over 20 horsepower, or a hay baler, a forklift, a power post-hold digger, or a chain saw. Nor should they work in a yard or stall in which there is a bull, boar, or stud horse, a sow with suckling pigs, or a cow with newborn calf.

The FLSA also prohibits those under 18 from certain kinds of occupations altogether. These include occupations that require working with explosives or radioactive materials, operating most power-driven woodworking, baking, or meat processing machines, as well as most jobs in mining, meatpacking, logging, and brick-making.

Some Did Work

The FLSA exempts certain kinds of work, including employment of children by their parents, and church work. Boys and girls also worked (as they do today) at jobs not covered by FLSA regulations, such as office or clerical work, retail sales positions, food preparation, caring for younger children, and so on.

Given these exemptions, what was the actual number working in 1940?

Gertrude Folks Zimand, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, in "The Changing Picture of Child Labor," published in 1944 in the Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (pages 83-91), reported that the 1940 census showed, among 14- to 15-year-olds, a total of 4,347,665 attending school, and a total of 209,347 gainfully employed (no number was reported for children ages 7-14 who were not in school but were gainfully employed, but the number of these children attending school was 15,034,695; the numbers for 16- to 17-year-olds were 3,361,206 in school and 662,967 gainfully employed). The term "Gainfully employed" included full- and part-time work, either in industry or agriculture. There was some overlap in these numbers because some children were in school but were also working, at least part-time. But according to Zimand, 64 percent of the 14- to 15-year-olds and 83 percent of the 16- to 17-year-olds who were working were out of school and were therefore presumably working full time.

For more information

Robert Whaples. "Child Labor in the United States." EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. October 7, 2005.

The text of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended.

The National Child Labor Committee website.
Child Labor Statistics at the United States Department of Labor.

Donald M. Fisk. "American Labor in the 20th Century" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Child Labor Laws and Enforcement," chapter 2 of the Report on the Youth Labor Force (revised 2000) at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This includes a brief history of child labor in the U.S. and the legislative restrictions governing it, as well as a discussion comparing aspects of youth employment in the U.S., such as temporary or part-time teen employment, with youth employment elsewhere in the world.

The Child Labor Public Education Project's website on Child Labor in U.S. History provides links to a variety of documents on child labor.

Bibliography

Children watching a Labor Day Parade, Silverton Colorado, September 1940. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Detail of photo of boy laborer in cranberry bog, Burlington County, New Jersey, 1938. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Grant Birthplace [OH]

Description

Ulysses S. Grant was born 27 April 1822 in picturesque Point Pleasant near the mouth of Big Indian Creek at the Ohio River. This restored one-story, three-room cottage, which was built in 1817, was next to the tannery where Grant's father worked. The small cottage is furnished with period items. At one time the birthplace made an extensive tour of the United States on a railroad flatcar and was also temporarily displayed on the Ohio State fairgrounds.

The site offers tours.