Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor

James D. Schmidt is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. His first book, Free to Work (1998), examined the relationship between labor law and the meanings of freedom during the age of emancipation. He teaches courses on the history of law, capitalism, childhood, and the United States in the long nineteenth century.

'Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor is an imaginative and compelling work of historical reconstruction. Through vividly told legal stories of injured child workers in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Appalachian South, Schmidt chronicles how clashes over new understandings of work and age transformed the lives of countless boys and girls and the society in which they lived. In doing so, he deftly weaves together legal, labor, and children's history to make a very persuasive case for the role of child labor in the construction of modern childhood and the modern legal and industrial order.' Michael Grossberg, Indiana University

• Prologue: the job; 1. Big enough to work; 2. The divine right to do nothing; 3. Mashed to pieces; 4. Natural instincts; 5. An injury to all; 6. The dawn of child labor; Epilogue: get up and play.