PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2020-04-20 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Is This a Photo of a 6-Year-Old Coal Miner? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • It's no surprise to students of history that throughout the American Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, and up until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, many children in the United States were allowed — or compelled — to spend long hours toiling at physically demanding, hazardous, and unhealthful jobs for marginal wages. As one history of The American Era of Child Labor described those circumstances: A meme commonly seen on social media attempts to vividly demonstrate the realities of the child labor era by displaying a photograph of a very young child (variously described as being 6 or 8 years old) who was supposedly working as a coal miner in the early 20th century: Although this photograph might reflect some realities of the child labor era, it does not literally depict a very young coal miner. The child seen here looks too young to have been working in a coal mine at all. But even if he were, boys that young were not put to work actually mining coal, a job too physically demanding for such small children. Rather, they would be assigned other tasks, most commonly serving as breaker boys who spent their days at the labor-intensive tasks of separating slate and other impurities from coal by hand: The original photograph looks to be merely a posed picture of a young boy dressed up with some props — he's gripping a tool (a pickaxe) far too large for him to wield, sporting a luxury he couldn't afford (a pipe), and standing in what looks far more like a photo studio than anything remotely resembling the environs of a coal mine: Indeed, the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah, where this photograph is displayed, confirmed to us that the picture was taken in a nearby studio and does not depict a child coal miner: In sum, children did account for much of the labor force in mines in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with boys as young as 8 put to work in the country’s many coal mines under grueling and dangerous conditions. But although the photograph seen above is from that era and reflective of its characteristics in a broad sense, it's merely a cute staged picture of a little boy dressed up with props and not a genuine snapshot of a child coal miner. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url