Rediscovering Lost Innocence (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In the first half of the nineteenth-century, responsibility for child care primarily rested within families. Needy children were often cared for by community-sponsored efforts that varied widely in quality, as well as by benevolent organizations dedicated to children's welfare. During the late 1800s progressive concerns about the role of the state in responding to societal changes resulting from urbanization and industrialization, Rhode Island took on a more active statewide role in public education, sewers, parks, prisons, and child welfare systems. New ideas about civil rights extended to race, to women, to labor, and to children. Old institutions, such as town almshouses and poor farms, were replaced by state institutions like the State Home that was created in 1870.

Rediscovering Lost Innocence focuses on the State Home Project that was started in 2001. With a State Home one might expect to find a huge record for custodial children well imbedded in regional literatures or social science and history texts, yet this was not the case. The State Home is an important place because of the children and citizens who each lived portions of their lives there. The educational, social and health experiences of each displaced, poor child are important, and documenting them is not inconsequential. Archaeologists of this project dug into the soils, read unexamined case histories, and talked with former residents to create evocative life histories and local or regional childhood narratives about the former residents of the State Home.

The experiences of the State Home were significant in our past; they demonstrate our common history. Rediscovering Lost Innocence offers the possibility of recovering lost and missing details, and creates a rich narrative of a place that is important to us in the present and to future generations.