Beginning early in the nineteenth century, thousands of Canadian boys, some as young as eight, laboured underground - driving pit ponies along narrow passageways, manipulating ventilation doors, and helping miners cut and load coal at the coalface to produce the energy that fuelled Canada's industrial revolution. Boys died in the mines in explosions and accidents but they also organised strikes for better working conditions but were instead expelled from the mines and lost their jobs.Boys in the Pits shows the rapid maturity of the boys and their role in resisting exploitation. In what will certainly be a controversial interpretation of child labour, Robert McIntosh recasts wage-earning children as more than victims, showing that they were individuals who responded intelligently and resourcefully to their circumstances.Boys in the Pits is particularly timely as, despite the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, accepted by the General assembly in 1989, child labour still occurs throughout the world and continues to generate controversy. McIntosh provides an important new perspective from which to consider these debates, reorienting our approach to child labour, explaining rather than condemning the practice. Within the broader social context of the period, where the place of children was being redefined as - and limited to - the home, school, and playground, he examines the role of changing technologies, alternative sources of unskilled labour, new divisions of labour, changes in the family economy, and legislation to explore the changing extent of child labour in the mines.Robert McIntosh is employed at the National Archives of Canada.

In the 1890s, Rossland was the most important mining centre in southeastern British Columbia. In Roaring Days, Jeremy Mouat examines many different aspects of mining, from work underground to corporate strategies. He also brings to life the unique individuals who were a part of this history -- the miners who toiled long hours under unimaginable working conditions, the citizens of Rossland who built a bustling town out of the wilderness, and the mine owners and entrepreneurs who became wealthy beyond all expectations.