Credit: Courtesy of the NYPL digital gallery, New York Public Library
In the early 1800s, American reformers pointed to education as a key to solving childhood poverty, homelessness, and other social problems. By the early 1820s, the "match girl," who staved off starvation by selling matches on city streets, had become a powerful symbol of the poverty that was plaguing American cities, and the injustices of the nation's emerging free market economy.
