| Peddling newspapers was one of the most common, conspicuous, and contested forms of child street work during America's first century of industrial and urban growth, yet its history has been obscured by myth and mired in cliche. This dissertation examines the changing experience and understanding of newsboys and other young street traders from the market revolution of the 1830s to the economic collapse of the 1930s. It reconceptualizes their work as part of an informal economy that was integral to the survival of poor families, the socialization of their children, and the fortunes of an entire industry. It demonstrates that the commercial press was a major employer, benefactor, and chronicler of working-class youth, exerting an unrecognized influence on their lives and on popular perceptions of class, capitalism, childhood, and the city.;Early chapters trace children's actual and symbolic role in the rise of the penny press, and describe the conditions of youth homelessness, the emergence of newsboy lodging houses, and the transformation of newspaper distribution into big business--all during a period of intense class, religious, and sectional conflict. Later chapters evaluate how African Americans, women and immigrant families fared in the news trade, and I explore how conceptions of race, gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality structured child labor markets, reformers' agendas, and myths of success. The dissertation ultimately calls for a broadened approach to the history of working people, one which recognizes that children as well as adults, images as well as events, and petty commerce as well as wage labor were important to the welfare of American families and communities, and the development of national values and institutions.;The dissertation has a national focus and relies on an array of narrative and visual sources to analyze both the material conditions and cultural meanings of street children's lives. Changing images of newsboys and girls reveal how and why their work could alternately be viewed as a public service and a social evil. These images formed the documentary basis for legislative and philanthropic intervention, and thus helped to constitute rather than simply reflect the reality of child street labor. |
