Lewis Hine: The Child Labour Photos That Shamed America
Video at link
Lewis Hine is most famous for his photographs of the construction workers who helped build the Empire State Building in 1930.
But in the years before he celebrated the heroic labour of these men working high above Manhattan, Hine used his photographs to campaign for social reform.
In 1908 the then-sociology professor was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to document how children as young as seven were working in cotton mills and coal mines.
Over a decade he took thousands of photographs that helped convince US lawmakers to introduce new industrial regulations to protect children.