Timeline of young people's rights in the United States

[1] The history of youth rights in the United States ranges from the earliest years of European settlements on North America.

In 1676 Nathan Knight, an eight-year-old boy, was apprenticed to a mason, "bound... to serve and abide the full space and term of twelve years and five months."

[2] By the end of the 19th century, American children worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks and peddlers.

Labor laws did not exist, and the common perception of the ease with which children were manipulated made them targets for a variety of rights violations.

In the 1980s the United States provided global leadership by acting as the "Tip of The Spear" among nations in crafting the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or CRC.

Baseball team composed mostly of child workers from a glass factory. Photograph by Lewis Hine , 1908.
Youth activists in a 1909 parade protesting child labor .
An (est.) seven-year-old newsboy in Washington, D.C. in 1921.
An 11-year-old picking cotton in Oklahoma in 1916.
An eight-year-old newsboy in St. Louis, Missouri in 1910.