1900s photo doesn’t show an 8-year-old miner, just a kid in a costume
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Nobody told us you don't simply burn things in raw corn cobs - there's some treatment involved before you can. I don't know if it was the tobacco, or the charring corn cob itself that made us gag most.
I thought it was weird that the other high school didn't have a smoking area, because we were in a tobacco farming town, and a huge number of teens worked in the tobacco industry.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/30/nyregion/school-smoking-b...
And of course, the teachers lounge was always smoke filled, walking in there was like walking into a bar at time, the air had a visible haze of cigarette smoke. I don’t know how the non smoking teachers could handle it.
Congressional testimony from 1917: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Select_Committees_on_Ci...>
And discussion (and cartoon) from a fictional treatment, also in 1917, The Academy for Princes by Olaf Morgan Norlie: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Academy_for_Princes...>
There were formal smoking-cessation programmes in, of all places, Germany of the 1930s, on health grounds. Among other distinctive characteristics of the country at the time, it lacked a substantial domestic tobacco industry, or tobacco-growing colonies, to oppose such policies, as was the case in the US and UK well into the 1980s and 1990s.
Formal medical epidemiological determination of a link between smoking and specific diseases wouldn't come about until the 1950s or so, but a substantial factor here was simply the development of modern concepts of disease causation and correlative demonstration of these. Common wisdom acknowledged the connection long before then.
Google's Ngram viewer shows many instances of "coffin nails", again, commonly associated with cigarettes, dating to the 1820s: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=coffin%20nails...>
This is also the time when the typical portion of wine was 1 bottle per person per day, everyday.
Wikipedia has a great summary of extant literature, more resources below,
The work performed by breaker boys was hazardous. Breaker boys were forced to work without gloves so that they could better handle the slick coal.[11][12][14] The slate was sharp, and breaker boys would often leave work with their fingers cut and bleeding.[11][12][14] Breaker boys sometimes had their fingers amputated by the rapidly moving conveyor belts.[6][10][11][15] Others lost feet, hands, arms, and legs as they moved among the machinery and became caught under conveyor belts or in gears.[6][10][11][15]
Many were crushed to death, their bodies retrieved from the gears of the machinery by supervisors only at the end of the working day.[6][10][11][15] Others were caught in the rush of coal, and crushed to death or smothered.[6][10][11][15] Dry coal would kick up so much dust that breaker boys sometimes wore lamps on their heads to see. Asthma and black lung disease were common.[4][6][10][11][14] Coal was often washed to remove impurities, which created sulfuric acid.[18][19] The acid burned the hands of the breaker boys.[20]
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we find it funny because it's cute. They found it funny because it was dark humor. Somewhere along the way, the core got lost, i.e. children were losing body parts, limbs and their lives on a daily basis for the crime of being born poor.
https://njdigitalhistory.org/jane-addams-child-labor/index.p...
https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-child-labor-committ...
That would tragically sometimes be 4 years later, at 12
https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/children.ht...
Average age of education for women when Lincoln was president was 2nd to 4th grade.
The GED was created by the military because dropping out of high school to go to work was common.
Farm workers frequently stopped attending school after 8th grade.
In the Deep South, with segregated schools, there sometimes weren't local high schools for Black students. Kids sometimes repeated 8th grade so they could stay in school until the family moved to a northern city where it was possible to attend high school.
Currently, we have a great many people saddled with college student loans and it's an excessive burden. It's a real problem and it needs to be solved, but it grows out of the idea that if you complete college, you are practically guaranteed to have a good career making good money and so we let people borrow to get the good life and now so many people have college some are waiting tables because there aren't enough jobs in their field.
In another 100 years, maybe having a doctorate will be some kind of default norm and hopefully we will have solved the problem of how to make ends meet when that doctorate doesn't get you a spiffy career and you are still waiting tables.
Progress is a wonderful thing -- real progress, I mean, and never mind the growing pains involved in raising our expectations when things don't turn out like we imagined. I hope we continue to grow.
But historically child labor was somewhat necessary to human survival. And given the apparently growing problem in the US with homelessness, I'm not sure it's reasonable to look back on this and feel morally superior.
I mean those are common almost everywhere and a quick search indicates another reason for their origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_break
> In the mid-1930s, a swimming coach from Colgate University decided to take his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand-new Olympic-size pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. The idea clicked with other college swim coaches and soon the spring training migration became an annual tradition for swimmers nationwide. Now, spring break is an academic tradition in various mostly western countries that is scheduled for different periods depending on the state and sometimes the region.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_...
I'm not readily finding a nice, neat blurb that literally says "spring break in elementary school/K-12 was so kids could help plant on the farm" but my understanding is that is correct.
Similarly, if I listed several previous wars, that wouldn't prove that "war was somewhat necessary to human survival".
> It was common in the area for children to work in mines, he said. The mining companies did a lot of recruiting before and during World War I, encouraging people to immigrate to the U.S. to escape war, hunger and other hardships. As a result, all members of a family would end up working in the industry.
> Boys would work in the mines from as young as 8, but not as miners. Instead, they picked impurities out of the coal, such as dirt or sharp pieces of slate, with their bare hands as it came by on a conveyor belt. These boys, who worked in dust-choked gloom, were called “boneys” — a local term for what was known as a breaker boy on the East Coast. Once they got older, they would work with their fathers underground.
I'm just saying it's kinda weird to write an article about "okay yeah lots of children worked in mines, but this specific child probably wasn't at the time of the photo" it's also kinda weird that it's written as if being a "miner" requires swinging a pick axe rather than working in a mine.
These articles are meant to attack the validity of photos of children working of the era to undermine the historical establishment of child labor laws at a time when the same laws are under modern threat.
Then when I reached high school, my so-called girlfriend discovered the toddler photos and made humiliating jokes about them. I suspect that my mother also had a difficult relationship with her father, and so that would explain so much.