We Were There, Too! | Story of the Story Teller | Classroom Activities | Selected Resources

Webography

Law For Kids (www.lawforkids.org)
America's first stand alone web site dedicated to teaching children about the law. The Site was created by the Arizona Foundation for Legal Services and Education with the specific goal of educating Arizona's youth, their parents, communities, and schools to increase their knowledge about youth laws and to encourage law-abiding behavior.

School for Iqbal (http://digitalrag.com/iqbal/index.html)
Iqbal was sold into child bonded labor at 4 years of age for the equivalent of $12. He escaped at age 10 and began to speak out against child slavery and for freedom and schools for all Pakistani children. Iqbal won the Reebok Human Rights Youth in Action Award 1994. Easter Sunday, 1995, he was murdered. In response, students at Broadmeadow Middle School formed this campaign in order to help fight for Iqbal's Dream.

Children in the Fields Campaign (www.afop.org)
The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs' mission is to improve the quality of life for migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families by providing advocacy for the member organizations that serve them.

Free the Children International (www.freethechildren.org)
Free The Children is an international network of children helping children at a local, national, and international level through representation, leadership and action. It was founded by Craig Kielburger in 1995, when he was 12 years old. The primary goal of the organization is not only to free children from poverty and exploitation, but to also free children and young people from the idea that they are powerless to bring about positive social change and to improve the lives of their peers.

UNICEF (www.unicef.org)
UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, is the global body that advocates internationally for comprehensive prenatal and early childhood care, girls' education, immunizations, HIV/AIDS prevention and upholds the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Teaching Tolerance (www.tolerance.org)
Tolerance.org is a principal online destination for people interested in dismantling bigotry and creating, in hate's stead, communities that value diversity.

Books
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. 1999. Kids On Strike! Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Students will respond in a new way to the history of the labor movement in America through the kid-centered perspective of this book. Incredibly informative yet still fun to read, it captures both the details of individual lives and the larger picture of the fight for child labor laws. Contains over 100 photographs from newspapers and journals of the early 20th century.

Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. 1996. Growing Up in Coal Country. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Inspired by the mining experience of her husband's Italian American grandfather, the author has gathered remarkable stories and photos of men, women, and children who lived and worked in the coal county of northeastern Pennsylvania in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is a story of immigrants in search of a better life, of children working long hours, of families banding together to keep old world traditions alive, and of workers uniting to strike against unfair and unsafe labor practices. Includes a bibliography.

Bernstein, Richard B. 1998. From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor in New York State, Volume II Civil War to Present. New York: State Education Department.
Three linked questions frame this study: What work should children do? At what age should they work? Under what conditions should they work? Over time Americans have answered these questions in different ways. The authors and their teacher-collaborators provide compelling case studies, background essays, reproduced primary documents, students research worksheets, and suggested teaching activities, to create a marvelous foundation for classroom explorations.

"Child Labor: A Selection of Materials on Children in the Workplace" (American Federation of Teachers, 1997)

"Child Labor: Information for Educators and Students" (National Education Association, 2001)

Wells Greene, Janet. 1995. From Forge to Fast Food: A History of Child Labor in New York State, Volume I Colonial Times through the Civil War. New York: State Education Department.
Three linked questions frame this study: What work should children do? At what age should they work? Under what conditions should they work? Over time Americans have answered these questions in different ways. The authors and their teacher-collaborators provide compelling case studies, background essays, reproduced primary documents, students research worksheets, and suggested teaching activities, to create a marvelous foundation for classroom explorations.

Partial Bibliography from We Were There Too! Young People in U.S. History by Phillip Hoose; Farrar Straus Giroux; 2001. Text copyright c2001 by Phillip Hoose

Surveys of United States History:

Bremmer, Robert Robert H., ed. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. (A series mostly about health and social programs for children from colonial times on.)
Colbert, David. Eyewitness to America. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
*Hakim, Joy. A History of Us. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993-97. (A ten-volume series about U.S. history, written for young readers.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

from Part Nine. "Times That Kept a-Changin'"

Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. New York: David McKay, 1962.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
Erickson, Wallace. Hard Drive. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992.
Hoose, Phillip. Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.
*Levine, Ellen. Freeedom's Children. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993.
*Rochelle, Belinda. Witness to Freedom. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Seabrook, John. "Getting Wired: E-mail from Bill." Article in The New Yorker, January 10, 1994.
White, Ryan. "Remarks to the Presidential Council on AIDS", March 1988.

*Written especially for young readers.

We Were There, Too! | Story of the Story Teller | Classroom Activities | Selected Resources