Historical Context: Newsies
In the movies, scrappy urban newsboys hawk papers with screaming headlines, shouting, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" Real late nineteenth and early twentieth century newsboys were very different than the Hollywood image of lovable street urchins singing and dancing in the streets. Newsboys first appeared on city streets in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of mass circulation newspapers. They were often wretchedly poor homeless children who often shrieked the headlines well into the night and often slept on the street. In 1866, a reformer named Charles Loring Brace...