New York Newsies (born approximately 1890)
Newsies were poor, often abandoned, sometimes immigrant children who sold newspapers on New York City streets in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Families meet some of the boys (and occasional girls) who worked as newsies, and explore the 1899 strike in which the newsies brought two New York newspapers almost to a standstill. Children and grown-ups can try their hand at being a newsie in an interactive digital game.
The "nation" area introduces visitors to the lives of shockingly young children who worked in factories, in tenement kitchens, in mines, and elsewhere. Focused on the photographs taken by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee in the early 1900s, this area invites visitors to consider what it meant to be a young worker when protective child labor laws were not yet in place.