History
In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. Sometimes this is also to give the children a better life than what they had with their family or because the family did not want the child to live with them any more. Child slavery refers to the slavery of children at a young age.
In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves became the property of the owner. This was the case with, for example, thralls and American slaves. In other cases, children were enslaved as if they were adults. Usually the status of the mother determined if the child was a slave, but some local laws varied the decision to the father. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom. The infamous Children's Crusade is believed to have led to the enslavement of many young pilgrims.
Read more about this topic: Child Slavery
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)