History Commons^™

Discriminating Tastes: How Advertisements Taught Consumerism And Race To Gilded Age Youths, Jaclyn Schultz

Theses and Dissertations

Commercial and social trends of the Gilded Age combined to give a unique and novel power to colorful advertising trade cards that were collected, exchanged, and preserved in scrapbooks by middle-class children living in the Northeast. These children were members of one of the earliest generations to grow up with mandatory co-educational schooling and to be part of a distinctive youth culture created through peer interactions. After 1876, advertising trade cards became ubiquitous and were a significant component of that peer culture. The cards were also innovative in that they were the first example of colored images to be made …

The Orphan Train Movement: Examining 19th Century Childhood Experiences, Sophie Goldsmith

Senior Theses and Projects

This project examines orphan trains and the movement's reverberating effects on the United States more closely. Founded by Reverend Charles Loring Brace, the orphan train program aimed to challenge the “greatest evil[s] of our city life” – migration, overpopulation, and poverty - through removing at risk youth from their urban residences.[1] Focused solely on impoverished and orphaned youths, the orphan train progam assisted in approximately 200,000 placements between 1853 and 1929, making it the largest child resettlement initiative in American history.[2]

[1] Thomas Bender. Towards an Urban Vision.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 151.

[2] Stephen O'Connor, …