Industrious in Their Stations is the first comparative study of child labor in eighteenth-century America. Focusing on Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, Sundue examines the work experiences of children and analyzes regional differences in child labor according to gender, race, and class.

During the eighteenth century, work was central to the lives of most young people. Work skills, learned young, were regarded as the crux of a useful education, heralded as a preventative against idleness and sin, and as representing a vital contribution to the economy. By century's end,...