Child labor

Learn what it was like to be one of the more than two million kids in 1900 who worked instead of going to school and what was done to make their lives better.

The fight to regulate child labor went on for many years, but this book tells the particular story of children who worked in the textile mills and marched with Mother Jones from Philadelphia to New York City in 1903.

Twelve-year-old Hannalee Reed is marched away from her home by the Yankees to work in a mill in Indiana during the Civil War. Her father is dead, and her mother is expecting another baby. When she and her brother are separated, she wonders if she'll ever be able to keep her promise to go back to Georgia.

Ten-year-old Rebecca likes to help her family by earning some money, but a Massachusetts cotton mill is not the same as working at a jewelry counter in a shopping mall. In the 1830s, long before there were laws to protect workers and keep kids from being exploited, a mill was a dusty, dirty place where the very air could make you sick. When talk comes of paying the girls and women less money, Rebecca has to decide whether to stand with the others or keep doing her job to bring in money for her family.

In the old days, poor children were much more likely to work long hours at hard jobs in scary and dangerous places than go to school and have a chance at a better life. But, sometimes the kids fought back, refusing to work until they got paid more and were treated better. These brave young workers were an important part of the Labor Movement in the United States.

Beautiful Esperanza has grown up in luxury at her father's ranch, but when her father dies as the Great Depression strikes Mexico, she and her sick mother must leave their home to go to work in the labor camps of Southern California.

A boy climbs aboard a rickety boat and travels back in time one hundred years to the Industrial Revolution where he suffers at the hand of his bosses. Meanwhile, his half-brother, frantically looking for him in the 20th century, comes across his brother's name in the history books where he had testified to the brutal conditions under which he has been forced to live.