New York's Newsboys: Charles Loring Brace and the Founding of the Children's Aid Society

Abstract

""New York Newsboys: Charles Loring Brace and the Founding of the Children's Aid Society (CAS) investigates Brace's visionary anti-poverty work among New York's vagrant children in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Taking as its central focus the CAS's flagship program-the Newsboys' Lodging House, which opened in 1854-this book examines its experiment in incentive-based youth engagement, its connection with other CAS branches, and its overall place in a continuum of child care. Brace forged new methods based on voluntary participation, a alternative to child asylums which policed the poor. Straddling periods dubbed antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age, CAS took root amid racial, ethnic, religious, nativist, and class-based tensions in a city absorbing a flood of poor immigrants and housing them in squalid conditions. Youth homelessness emerged as a new social problem. Brace's plan included a central office for intra- and extra-agency referrals; outreach; schools, reading rooms, evening entertainment, Sunday meetings, lodging houses, and emigration options for fostering or employing children in the West. The plan was stunning in its size, scope, and vision. It provided for children's basic needs while offering pathways out of poverty. Brace's goals were nothing short of eradicating child poverty, reducing homelessness, reducing illiteracy, preventing juvenile delinquency, improving child and maternal health, providing employment and job training, and promoting sympathy for poor children among the wealthy. Brace's internationally recognized work had a profound impact on child well-being and offered a radical alternative to the jural, carceral, and policing tactics common in the day ""--