- Historical Eras > Industrialization and Expansion (1877-1913) (x)
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Child Cotton Pickers Haul Heavy Loads
Child cotton-pickers on a farm in Bells, Texas, documented by Lewis W. Hine, a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Children had long been used as cotton-pickers and other agricultural workers in the South, where the tradition of [...]
Jewish Immigrants March to Abolish Child Labor
This photograph, taken during a labor parade in New York City in 1909, shows two young women wearing banners that read "Abolish Child Slavery!" in English and Yiddish. Jewish immigrants were especially active in many labor causes at the turn of the [...]
Boys Play Among Litter on a New York City Street
Around 1900, an anonymous photographer captured this image of children playing in a New York City street, near open sewers and a dead horse. Such scenes prompted reformers to campaign for better sanitation in U.S. cities.
Girls Picnic at Coney Island
Amusement parks (built at the end of trolley lines to stimulate traffic) achieved broad appeal in the early 1900s, especially among the legions of young immigrant men and women who flocked to parks and beaches on their days off. New York's Coney [...]
Photographers Capture the Trauma of War in the Philippines
These images captured with a stereopticon depict the realities of war in the Philippines, showing both Filipino and American experiences.
"Cotton Picking in Georgia"
In the 1890s, most African Americans labored in the southern cotton economy. Some owned their own farms, but many worked in a system called sharecropping. Landlords provided sharecroppers with land, a cabin, farm tools, and cotton seed; in return, [...]
"Bandit's Roost"
Jacob Riis—a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant—exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, first published in [...]
"A Settlement house worker visits a newly-arrived family"
Progressive reformers established settlement houses to aid new immigrants and instill American middle class values. Some social workers were sympathetic to the immigrants' problems and helped publicize their plight. Others were critical of immigrant [...]
"Bananas Being Loaded into Waiting Carts"
New York dockworkers unload bananas from a cargo ship into a waiting cart in this early twentieth-century photograph by maritime photographer Edwin Levick. Their work was dangerous—the fatality rate for longshoremen was higher than for any [...]
"Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement"
Lodgers in a boarding room on New York's Bayard Street charging "five cents a spot" exemplify the overcrowded, frequently squalid living conditions that immigrants in New York City faced at the turn of the twentieth century. As documented in Jacob [...]