Past stories

In the 1840s a disease destroyed the potato crop across Ireland, the single food most poor families depended on to live. Over a million people died of hunger and disease, and more than a million left the country.

In the 1930s, drought and dust storms drove hundreds of thousands of families off their farms in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Great Plains. Many drove west to California for work, where their children picked cotton and fruit for a few cents and lived in roadside camps.

In Victorian London, children called "mudlarks" scavenged the banks of the River Thames at low tide, hunting the mud for coal, rope, nails, and scrap they could sell for a few pennies a day. Many were under twelve and worked barefoot in freezing river mud.