Abandoned : Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City / Julie Miller.
2008
HV885.N5
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Details
Title
Abandoned : Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City / Julie Miller.
Author
Miller, Julie, author.
ISBN
9780814764411
Published
New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2008]
Copyright
©2008
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource
Other Standard Identifiers
10.18574/nyu/9780814764411.001.0001 doi
Call Number
HV885.N5
Dewey Decimal Classification
362.76
Summary
Two interesting items: The author's article in New York ArchivesA letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale PressIn the nineteenth century, foundlings-children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth-were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city's leaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children.In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked America's biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in the East River.Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve children's lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the four foundling asylums had closed, as adoption took the place of abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned rescues its history from obscurity.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 18. Sep 2023)
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print 9780814757253
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 "Children of Accident and Mystery": Foundlings in History and Literature
2 "New York as a Nursing Mother": Foundlings in the Antebellum City
3 "The Murder of the Innocents": New York Discovers Its Foundlings
4 "The Basket at the Door": The Foundling Asylums Open
5 "Out-Heroding Herod": The Foundlings and the Revolutionary
6 The End of the Foundling Asylums
7 Conclusion: The Foundling Disappears-Almost
Notes
Index
About the Author
Contents
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 "Children of Accident and Mystery": Foundlings in History and Literature
2 "New York as a Nursing Mother": Foundlings in the Antebellum City
3 "The Murder of the Innocents": New York Discovers Its Foundlings
4 "The Basket at the Door": The Foundling Asylums Open
5 "Out-Heroding Herod": The Foundlings and the Revolutionary
6 The End of the Foundling Asylums
7 Conclusion: The Foundling Disappears-Almost
Notes
Index
About the Author