NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Using the History of Childhood to Teach the History of the  American South

Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

As I was preparing last winter to teach my course on the American South since Reconstruction, I knew that I wanted to do something different for at least one of the paper assignments.  I was tired of traditional essays, and I wanted my students—primarily history majors—to work with different kinds of sources.  I also wanted to figure out a way to incorporate the amazing collection of Lewis Hine Photographs at UMBC Special Collections.  Hine is well known for his sensitive photographs of immigrants, workers, and especially of child laborers.

A young spinner in the Whitnel Cotton mill, Whitnel, NC., photographed by
Lewis Hine in 1908
(The Photography Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

In 1908 Lewis Hine became a staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (a progressive organization dedicated to bettering conditions for working children).  Hine spent the next decade traveling around the country documenting child laborers in a variety of industries:  textile mills, coal mines, canneries, and the like.  His sensitive and moving images helped to galvanize public support for limitations on child labor.   UMBC has a collection of about 4700 images, and they have been digitized. I met with Tom Beck, Chief Curator of Special Collections, and together we came up with a plan for my students to take a selection of images and write essays placing them into historical context.  They would use these essays as the basis of a website, which could highlight the resources we have at UMBC, as well as make the images more broadly available.  Many of Hine's photographs, particularly those of young textile workers,  have achieved iconic status, but they are really the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to make things as easy for my students as possible (and to keep close control of the assignment), so I created "picture packets" of 5 related images.  They might all come from the same mill, or the same industry.  With only one or two exceptions, each packet comprised images from only one state.  For example, the Mississippi:  Shrimp Pickers packet held photographs of young workers in Biloxi, while North Carolina:  Doffers showed young workers in Cherryvale, Gastonia, and Hickory.  Because this was a class in Southern history, I limited myself to images from states south of the Mason-Dixon line.  I looked for photographs with detailed captions (written by Hine himself), and I tried to find a range of occupations.  Ultimately the packets came from thirteen states, and a range of work environments:  textile mills, coal mines, agricultural labor, canneries, oyster shuckers and shrimp pickers, cigar and cigarette production, and glass-blowing.  One surprise was how few photographs there were of African-American children.  While I knew that few African Americans worked in the textile mills, I had expected to see more in other areas, and it appears that Hine simply didn't photograph them.

My class met with Tom Beck for an overview of the Hine pictures and Hine's life, and then I set them loose on their images, along with a long bibliography of works on Hine specifically and child labor in general.  The students researched the occupations in their photographs, the larger industries, even the specific companies for whom the children worked.  They found other primary and secondary sources, and one especially enterprising student went to the Library of Congress to do even more specific work.  And the students turned up some fascinating information that helped to broaden their image of child labor and of its impact in the South.

I think students also came to realize, just as Hine's audience did almost a century ago, that child labor went well beyond the stereotype of the dead-eyed lint heads.  Farm work was just as onerous as factory labor (though at least the children had the benefits of fresh air).  One student discovered children as young as five in a Baptist-run orphanage in Waxahachie Texas being forced to pick cotton.  Another explored the way that children were hired as "dinner toters," bringing meals to their parents in cotton mills but then staying on to work—this was a common attempt to evade the rudimentary child labor laws in effect.  Students were shocked to find children as young as four or five working in canneries, often not speaking any English or receiving any schooling at all.  They found connections between their packets at times:  shrimp and oyster workers employed by the same large cannery company; berries and beans picked in Maryland being canned in Baltimore.

Once the students had finished their essays, they used a standard template to format them, and then uploaded them to the web.  I did a little bit of work cleaning them up and building in links, and then (with the help of some IT staff at UMBC), we exported the site and made it public.  It has already received some recognition—I've gotten notes from other people working on Hine and a reporter in Alabama used our site for an article on the oyster industry.  The students generally enjoyed the project—even the ones who were afraid of the on-line aspects.  I was quite pleased with how it all turned out.

This was a seamless way to integrate the history of childhood into a course.  We often referred back to these children over the course of the semester, imagining them as adults facing the rigors of the Great Depression, the challenges of World War II and the profound transformation the South experienced in the 1950s-1960s.  The Hine photographs helped to personalize the 20th century South, and that in turn strengthened my students' connection to the course and the period.  

The site can be seen at: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~arubin/HIST402_SP2007/index.php