San Antonio College Library

As Timothy Hacsi shows, most children in nineteenth-century orphan asylums were "half-orphans," children with one living parent who was unable to provide for them. The asylums spread widely and endured because different groups - churches, ethnic communities, charitable organizations, fraternal societies, and local and state governments - could adapt them to their own purposes. In the 1890s, critics began to argue that asylums were overcrowded and...