Child Labor

In the late nineteenth century a lot of kids went to work every day, from sunrise to sundown. They worked in factories. They crawled into the tiny spaces in coal mines where grownups couldn't fit. They shouted headlines on street corners to sell newspapers. They plowed fields, picked cotton and made cloth.

The people who hired kids liked to have them as workers because it was easier to make them work hard, and they could pay them less than grownups. Children went to work to help their families when there was no money for a place to live or food to eat. But the work was dangerous and unhealthy.