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

New York's Newsboys is a lively historical account of Charles Loring Brace's founding and development of the Children's Aid Society to combat a newly emerging social problem, youth homelessness, during the nineteenth century. Poor children slept on the docks, pilfered, and peddled cheap wares to survive, activities which frequently landed them in prison-like juvenile asylums. Brace offered a radical alternative, the Newsboys' Lodging House. From there he launched a network of additional programs, each respecting his clients' free will, contrasting with the policing interventions favored by other reformers. Over four decades Brace built a comprehensive child welfare agency which sought to alleviate suffering, prevent delinquency, and divert children from a life of poverty.

Using primary documents and analysis of over 700 original CAS case records, New York's Newsboys offers a new way to look at the foundational roots of social work and child welfare in the United States. In this book, Karen Staller argues that the significance of this chapter in history to the profession, the city of New York, and the country has been under appreciated.

Karen M. Staller, PhD, JD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She is author of Runaways: How the Sixties Counter Culture Shaped Today's Policy and Practices; co-author of Seeking Justice in Child Sexual Abuse: Shifting Burdens and Sharing Responsibilities (with Kathleen Faller) and co-editor of the journal, Qualitative Social Work. Staller resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a pampered dog and a pair of sociable guinea pigs.

Introduction: New York, a City of Layers and Philanthropic Woolen Strings

Chapter One: Mr. Brace's Arrival: New York, 1849-53
Chapter Two: Families Life in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York and Sketching Out a Children's Aid Society

Chapter Three: Opening the Newsboys' Lodging House: Proposal to Practice, 1854

Chapter Four: Eddying Point: Mr. Macy's Central Office

Chapter Five: The Earliest Newsboys' Lodging House Residents: The Good and the Bad, 1855-56

Chapter Six: Advancing the Lines: Building an Anti-Poverty Agenda, Newsboys' Lodging House, 1855-1861

Chapter Seven: Mr. Macy's Record Books: Newsboys' Lodging House and Emigration Branch, 1861-1866

Chapter Eight: Newsboys' Lodging House Expansion and Institutionalization: The O'Connor Years

Chapter Nine: The Society Mr. Brace Built and Its Legacy


Appendix

Endnotes