Securing Homes: Orphan Trains as a Way of Curing Ills of the Late 19th Century America
Journal Title: Kultura Popularna - Year 2018, Vol 4, Issue 58
Abstract
Rapid changes in American society at the late 19th century bred social ills which required solving with the use of all available resources of the era. One of the tools, developed by the Children’s Aid Society of New York, was the “Orphan Trains” program. It focused on the “street Arabs,” poor kids of New York tenements who in large numbers were relocated to Midwestern farms to be Americanized, taught to work and saved from destitution. The scheme is viewed through its central metaphor of “home” which refers not only to the homes found for the orphans but also the homes of the emerging bourgeois class as well as the tenement dwellings. The work attempts to show that saving innocent victims tried in fact to ensure stability of American society at large as it addressed growing economic disproportions, grave shortage of labor on farms and a threat to American participatory democracy caused by influx of unskilled foreigners. Moreover, the scheme of relocation employed community based, self-help solutions which drew on the traditional American values of family, home and hard work and attempted to address new ills with well-established methods of indentured work. Simultaneously, it implemented modern ideas concerning childhood, child care or charity.<br/><br/>
Authors and Affiliations
Małgorzata Gajda-Łaszewska
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP423012
- DOI 10.5604/01.3001.0012.8076
- Views 66
- Downloads 0
Abstrakty do numeru: Kultura Popularna nr 4 (50) / 2016, Kompetencje medialne II
Kompetencje medialne II<br/><br/>
“Uncanny Domesticity” in Contemporary American Fiction: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri
The argument contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction – in particular her two novels to date, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowlands (2013) – features a combination of the elements of homeliness and estrangement, domestic and...
The Inverted Discourse of Wonder in Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans
The article discusses Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, a famous account of the writer’s travel in the United States undertaken in the 1820s, and focuses on the language it employs to describe the you...
Fifty Shades Of Real. The Sexual and the Virtual in Spike Jonze’s Her
Metafora konsumpcji. Sposób opisu zmian kulturowych i społecznych w Ameryce lat 80. i 90. XX wieku w filmie Co gryzie Gilberta Grape’a Lassego Hallströma
The purpose of the paper is to present an image of American society presented in the movie What is eating Gilbert Grape by Lasse Hallström. It is the film that not only represents a consumer society, but promises the com...