New York's Newsboys: Charles Loring Brace and the Founding of the Children's Aid Society

""New York Newsboys: Charles Loring Brace and the Founding of the Children's Aid Society (CAS) investigates Brace's visionary anti-poverty work among New York's vagrant children in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Taking as its central focus the CAS's flagship program-the Newsboys' Lodging House, which opened in 1854-this book examines its experiment in incentive-based youth engagement, its connection with other CAS branches, and its overall place in a continuum of child care.

Brace forged new methods based on voluntary participation, a alternative to child asylums which policed the poor.

Straddling periods dubbed antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age, CAS took root amid racial, ethnic, religious, nativist, and class-based tensions in a city absorbing a flood of poor immigrants and housing them in squalid conditions.

Youth homelessness emerged as a new social problem. Brace's plan included a central office