Did you know that my birthday is Pins and Needles Day? Aaaack! How much more not appropriate could that be? Lol. Shelley's going through and finding obscure holidays for her Singing Elves to sing about.
Okay, so these articles I read. Here's proving we do really learn things in college.
In the 1880's in one tenement in Manhattan there were over 2,000 people living per acre. Today in Manhattan, which is the most densely populated area in the US, there are just around 100 people per acre. My parents' house is on a quarter-acre, setting the average for my neighborhood at about 16 people per acre. Can you imagine 2,000 people in the space of four houses on my block???
In Manhattan in the 1880s the death rate for children under five was one in seven. It was the third worst death rate in the entire world, including third-world countries. To put things in perspective, today the United States' under-five death rate is one in 125.
In 1906, children under the age of 14 comprised more than 25% of the workforce in Southern states, particularly in the textile industry. There were more than 60,000 children under the age of 12 employed in the South, starting as young as five or six, and working 10-16 hour days.
Pennsylvania had the highest child-slave-labor rate in the United States at that time. Most were boys between the ages of 8 and 13 working in coal mines.
In the Chicago stockyards, rotten meat sent back from overseas was treated with borax and put into the grinders for sausage to be sold in the US.
The phrase "everything but the squeal" was actually true as it related to the use of pigs in meat processing.
If a person accidentally fell into the vatts, he was usually no more than bones by the time he was found, and became part of the lard to be shipped to stores and sold.
Poisoned rats, the poisoned bread used to poison the rats, and the rats' droppings all went into the processed ham.
Thankfully, the Manhattan tenements were torn down in 1887 and replaced with parks, and the residents of such tenements were given more adequate housing. Child labor laws are now enforced. And the publishing of The Jungle lead the the Pure Food and Drug Act, put into effect in 1906.
And that is just a sampling of knowledge I gained from this unit on muckrakers around the turn of the century. <.g> That tuition money is actually worth something!