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.

From Benjamin Franklin to Ragged Dick to Jack Kelly, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long intrigued Americans as symbols of struggle and achievement. But what do we really know about the children who hawked and delivered newspapers in American cities and towns? Who were they? What was their life like? And how important was their work to the development of a free press, the survival of poor families, and the shaping of their own attitudes, values and beliefs? Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective of its most unshushable creation. It is the first book to place newsboys at the center of American history, analyzing their inseparable role as economic actors and cultural symbols in the creation of print capitalism, popular democracy, and national character. DiGirolamo's sweeping narrative traces the shifting fortunes of these "little merchants" over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform, chronicling their exploits in every region of the country, as well as on the railroads that linked them. While the book focuses mainly on boys in the trade, it also examines the experience of girls and grown-ups, the elderly and disabled, blacks and whites, immigrants and natives. Based on a wealth of primary sources, Crying the News uncovers the existence of scores of newsboy strikes and protests. The book reveals the central role of newsboys in the development of corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. It argues that the newspaper industry exerted a formative yet overlooked influence on working-class youth that is essential to our understanding of American childhood, labor, journalism, and capitalism.

Publishes in-depth articles on labor subjects, current labor statistics, information about current labor contracts, and book reviews.

Child Labor in City Streets is a book by Edward N. Clopper. It examines and discusses a neglected form of child labor in 20th century America, namely newsboys, bootblacks and peddlers that were common at the time in major cities.