Two interesting items The authors article in New York ArchivesA letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale PressIn the nineteenth century, foundlings#151children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth#151were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickenss Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the citys leaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children.In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked Americas biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and...

Binding: Paperback;336 pages; Publisher: NYU Press - IPS; Classification: HBTB; Weight: 574 g; Dimensions: 152 x 228 x 20

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