Abandoned : foundlings in nineteenth-century New York City / Julie Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Julie, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Abandoned children--New York (State)--New York--History--19th century.

Abandoned children.

History.

New York (State)--New York.

Physical Description:

xiii, 319 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2008]

Summary:

By the eve of the Civil War, New York City, like London and Paris before it, had an epidemic of foundlings-children abandoned by their poor, desperate, and typically unmarried mothers. This now forgotten social problem was produced by the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty-particularly female poverty-and it was compounded by the stigma attached to so-called fallen women and their children.

In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating problem that wracked New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity to recognition of their plight as a sign of urban moral decline in need of systematic intervention.

Contents:

Children of accident and mystery : foundlings in history and memory

New York as a nursing mother : foundlings in the antebellum city

The murder of the innocents : New York discovers its foundlings

The basket at the door : the foundling asylums open

Out-Heroding Herod : the foundlings and the revolutionary

The end of the foundling asylums

Conclusion : the foundling disappears

almost.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-310) and index.

ISBN:

9780814757253

0814757251

9780814757260

081475726X

OCLC:

176648931

Online:

Contributor biographical information

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