Customer Rating: 
Summary: PBS wins again!
Comment: This is a wonderful DVD to introduce students into this aspect of american history. I wish it could have been a little longer, perhaps had more interviews and stories as special features seperate from the main feature etc... so my students could use it as part of research. Anything made by PBS is always high quality and has resources on PBS.org.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: an adoption system of the past
Comment: From the 1850s to the 1920s, a philanthropist sent orphaned and poor children from New York City to farms in the Midwest and West. By fluke, a recently deceased woman found his diary and helped to shed light on this topic.
I had known that French female orphans were sent to Quebec to be wives and maids for colonists centuries ago. However, I didn't know that the US had an adoption plan that crossed vast boundaries, in the past. This disc covers many questions that would concern adoptions of any kind. Were some children picked over others? Were adoptive parents grateful or abusive? Did the children want to be adopted? What happened when things didn't work out between child and potential parents? It'll warm your heart to see that some adoptees truly found love and shelter. Still, this work was realistic enough to talk of children that were abused and practically enslaved, though the work never say anything on the topic of sexual molestation.
Another thing this work NEVER mentions is RACE. Though it notes that the children were often a different ethnicity and religion than the English-descended, Protestant, adoptive parents, it fails to note that every child here was white. Did the philanthropist who started the program not care about black orphaned children? Did blacks have ways of adopting children that was unlike that of whites? (Is that why the 1980s film "Annie" only had white girls in it?) Though fictional, "Gangs of New York", based during the same time period, mentioned a black orphanage. So there were parentless black children at that time. It's possibly unjust that their stories were not brought up here. Also, the work talks of children being suspected of having "bad blood" (totally unrelated to STDs) from their parents, yet the word "eugenics" never comes up.
The migration of human groups fascinates me. I recently saw a documentary on how English women were shipped to Australia in its colonial days. I am the proud descendant of African Americans who moved during the Great Migration of the early to mid-1900s. Modern immigration is what is changing the birth rate and ethnic make-up of modern America. If mass migrations fascinate you too, then you may really benefit from seeing this work.
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