Book Review

Canada and the United States

Timothy A. Hacsi has written the first comprehensive history of orphan asylums since Homer Folks published The Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children (1900). This well-researched book, which pays close attention to the history of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish orphanages from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s, is a long-overdue addition to the history of children and social welfare in the United States.	1
Hacsi traces the history of orphanages from the antebellum era, when they grew rapidly in number, to the 1890s and the Progressive era, when critics challenged their very existence—criticism that provoked children's asylums to integrate young inmates into local communities and more willingly return children to their families. The history concludes in the 1930s, when most orphanages were displaced either by foster care programs or Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children), which permitted poor children to stay with their own families and avoid institutionalization. Subsequently, many orphanages transformed themselves into homes for children with behavioral, emotional, or psychological problems or into foster care agencies.	2
Overall, the history of orphan asylums challenges the model of asylum growth put forward by David J. Rothman in The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971). Hacsi argues that Rothman's model of asylum change—from early nineteenth-century optimism and reform to pessimism and custodialism by the late nineteenth century—fits reform schools, mental hospitals, and prisons but not orphan asylums. They, instead, became more humane over the years.	. . .