History 271/476

Devine

Spring 2016

Study Questions for David Nasaw, Children of the City – Chapters 8-11, Epilogue

The questions below highlight the book’s main points and will help guide your reading. The number in parentheses is the chapter to which the question corresponds.

1. Why was having money important for the children? What did money give them? How did they spend their money? (8)

2. Why did the city children so enjoy going to the nickelodeons? Why did the reformers believe the nickelodeons were corrupting the children? (8)

3. Why did parents want to keep money out of their children’s hands? Why did the children resist parents’ efforts to deprive them of their money? (9)

4. How did having money enable the city children to exercise leverage over their parents? (9)

5. Why was having money especially important for working girls? How did the double standard influence what they bought (or thought they needed to buy)? (9)

6. What were the “child savers” trying to save the city children from? What “corruptions” and “dangers” especially worried child welfare reformers? (10)

7. In discussing the adults’ and reformers’ concerns about the corruption of youth, Nasaw remarks, “The adults should not have worried as much as they did.” How does he support this claim? (10)

8. Why were the street traders so hard to “police”? What steps did the children take to undermine the reformers’ efforts to “save” them? (10)

9. Describe the activities of the “newsboys’ courts.” Why did they succeed in “policing” the children whereas the reformers’ efforts failed? Why did they only last a short time before being shut down? (10)

10. In what ways were the street children a “self-governing society?” (11)

11. Why did children choose to cooperate with each other? Why were the reformers and “experts” wrong to believe that this cooperation revealed the children’s “lower evolutionary state.” (11)

12. How did the behavior and attitudes of the city children reflect the United States’ shift from a producer to a consumer society? (Epilogue)

13. How did growing up on the streets prepare the city children for adult life? (Epilogue)

14. How did the children of the city who became actors and filmmakers as adults project the values and lessons they had learned on the streets into the movies of the 1920s and 1930s? (Epilogue)

15. How did their childhood experiences help the street traders survive bad times as adults and lead to a perhaps uncritical patriotism later in their lives? (Epilogue)