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Child Labor Laws Before Federal Regulation

These maps, which come from a 1933 Department of Labor report on child labor,document the uneven effects of state laws regulating the employment of children and teenagers.
During the first decades of the 20th century, progressives sought to regulate what they saw as exploitative employment of poor and immigrant children. Photographers such as Lewis Hine documented impossibly tiny newsboys, textile workers, and field hands, making a visual appeal to middle-class Americans, who were properly horrified.

Map2

Civil War Helped Make Christmas a Permanent American Tradition

Thomas Nast was perhaps the most famous artist to marry Christmas and the Civil War [PDF], but other commercial artists of lesser distinction followed suit. This large engraving, by popular Boston publisher Louis Prang & Company, opts for a more positive, universal vision of Christmas spirit across the land. The overflowing frame holds domestic scenes of boys and girls in bed, a tabletop Christmas tree “within” the house and a sleigh-ride “without,” and a smiling Santa Claus holding a steaming figgy pudding and what might be a bowl of warm punch.

ChristmasEverywhereFinal

Gay Nigerians targeted as 'un-African'

Despite evidence of homosexual customs pre-dating the colonial era, intolerant laws are flourishing across Africa.

After news broke that President Goodluck Jonathan had on January 7 signed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition bill, unanimously approved by lawmakers in May 2013…

While condemned by the likes of the United Nations and the European Union, the law is praised by a majority of Nigerians, who have united under a banner of patriotism and what many perceive as a fight against Western imperialism. The president’s spokesperson reportedly stated that the law “reflects the religious and cultural preferences of the Nigerian people”.

A 2013 Pew survey that interviewed adult Nigerians found that 98 percent of respondents agreed that homosexuality “should not be accepted into society”…

Amnesty International reported that 16 African countries do not have criminal laws against homosexuality, whereas 38 have made it illegal…

“We don’t ask the Europeans to be polygamists,” President Macky Sall told US President Barack Obama in 2013. “We like polygamy in our country, but we can’t impose it in yours. Because the people won’t understand it. They won’t accept it. It’s the same thing.”

When Pete Seeger Faced Down the House Un-American Activities Committee

Amid all the tributes and accolades to Pete Seeger today, it’s easy to paper over the extent to which his career was almost destroyed by associations with communism and his refusal to testify to Congress about his time in the Communist Party.
When, in August 1955, he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to discuss his political associations and activities, and chastised the committee for the entire inquiry. As he put it that day:

I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American. I will tell you about my songs, but I am not interested in telling you who wrote them, and I will tell you about my songs, and I am not interested in who listened to them.

Seeger was later indicted by a federal jury on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 10 concurrent one-year prison terms, which he never served. In 1962, the convictions were overturned.
Seeger also discussed this, among other adventures, on Fresh Air in 1985

Putin's Games: Influence Peddling at the Feeding Troughs of Sochi

The president has used the spectacle — and the vast construction contracts involved — to secure his own power and to rid himself of rivals.

Just 18 months ago, Putin appeared weakened as a result of ballot box fraud and mass demonstrations. But now he is using the Olympic Games to present himself as a leader who can do everything. And he is using the event to consolidate his rule and shunt aside rivals. Those who serve him unconditionally are allowed to profit handsomely. Those who don’t lose his blessing.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Solution to Poverty

When Americans stop to commemorate Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr. each year, we tend to do a great disservice to the man’s legacy by glossing over his final act as an anti-poverty crusader. In the weeks leading to his assassination, King had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the “Poor People’s Campaign.” The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would “dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation’s leaders.” The great civil rights leader was killed before he could see the effort through.

So what, exactly, was the reverend’s economic dream? In short, King wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.

Andrew Jackson: Amazing

One hundred and seventy-nine years ago today, President Andrew Jackson had a close call. The 67-year-old president emerged from a funeral in the House chamber and was set upon by Richard Lawrence, a housepainter who was off that day. Initiating what would become the first assassination attempt in American history, Lawrence tried to fire his pistol. It made a large bang, but the president did not fall. The percussion cap had detonated, but the gunpowder failed to ignite.

Jackson then brained his attacker with his cane. The blow did not significantly muddle Lawrence, because he was already very muddled in the head. He had attacked the seventh president because he believed that the U.S. government owed him a large sum of money. Jackson, who was engaged in a brutal struggle with the Whigs over the National Bank, was nevertheless not in control of it or any other bank. Still, Lawrence would not be deterred from his belief that if he killed Jackson the funds would be released and he would take his place as the rightful King of England and Rome. Though he was confused about the line of succession, he was thorough. He produced a second pistol, which he also attempted to fire. It too would not discharge. At this point everyone stopped so that a fine pen and ink drawing could be made. Then, Jackson was assisted by others, including Davy Crockett of Tennessee, then a member of Congress, who was apparently serving on the Readiness-in-Case-of-Crazy-Historical-Moments subcommittee of the House It-Can’t-Get-Any-Weirder Committee.

Lawrence was subdued and ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity and very bad luck. It was later discovered that he had asked the Jackson administration for a civil service appointment and was denied. He lived the rest of his life in an institution.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Institution studied Lawrence’s derringers a century after the assassination attempt. Both fired on the first try.

Five months later, Jackson would also receive another threat. A man wrote him a letter from a Philadelphia hotel promising to slit his throat while he slept if he did not release two pirates being held in prison. Nothing became of it. The killing of a president would be left to the correspondent’s son, John Wilkes Booth.

-Thanks John Dickerson at Slate

Old Mexico lives on

On February 2nd 1848, following a short and one-sided war, Mexico agreed to cede more than half its territory to the United States. An area covering most of present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, plus parts of several other states, was handed over to gringolandia. The rebellious state of Tejas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, was recognised as American soil too. But a century and a half later, communities have proved more durable than borders.

2012 Economist Survey of Mexico

Here is the 2012 survey and here are the response questions.
Also, so that we can refer to the piece in our conversation, please print out the one article assigned to you (just a couple pages).

All read and respond to the introductory article. Then Groups 1-4 read:

1. Señores, start your engines
2. The gain before the pain: Mexico’s demographic dividend will be short-lived
3. Stretching the safety net: Falling ill is no longer an economic disaster
4. Mexico’s states: The 31 banana republics

Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population

In a quarter-century, at the rate Nigeria is growing, 300 million people — a population about as big as that of the present-day United States — will live in a country roughly the size of Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Nigeria’s unemployment rate is nearly 50 percent for people in urban areas ages 15 to 24 — driving crime and discontent.

Nigeria made contraceptives free last year, and officials are promoting smaller families as a key to economic salvation, holding up the financial gains in nations like Thailand as inspiration.

Nigeria, already the world’s sixth most populous nation with 167 million people Muriana Taiwo, 45, explained that it was “God’s will” for him to have 12 children by his three wives, calling each child a “blessing” because so many of his own siblings had died.

Photoessay here

This Latest Chinese Censorship News Is Important, and Bad

If the front page story today in the NYT is right, Bloomberg has made a craven decision that calls its larger credibility into question. According to the Timesarticle, Bloomberg managers in New York decided to squash stories by their (aggressive) China-based reporters for fear of angering the Chinese government. The less-damaging rationale for this decision is Bloomberg’s concern that its reporters might be kicked out of China. The more-damaging suspicion is that the company was worried that it would lose subscribers in China for its cash-cow Bloomberg financial terminals.

This is part of a much more widespread pattern of making it hard for international journalists to get into China.

This is not the way a confident, big-time government behaves.

Scottish independence: Referendum White Paper unveiled

The 670-page White Paper promised a “revolution” in social policy, with childcare at its heart.

The launch came ahead of next September’s independence referendum.

Alistair Darling, leader of the campaign to keep the Union, branded the document a “work of fiction, full of meaningless assertions”.

On 18 September, Scots voters will be asked the yes/no question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

Launching the paper – titled Scotland’s Future: Your guide to an independent Scotland – in Glasgow, Mr Salmond said: “This is the most comprehensive blueprint for an independent country ever published, not just for Scotland but for any prospective independent nation.???