Child Labor and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

View my benchmark here.

Sources:
"A New View of Society" by Robert Owen
http://www.skeptically.org/literaryworksofjk/id1.html
"The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era" by Micheline Ishay
http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html
http://www.archive.org/details/ReportOfTheAnnualSessionsOfTheFederationOfOrganizedTradesAndLabor
National Child Labor Committee Collection
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=59
http://www.nationalchildlabor.org/history.html
http://www.lawnix.com/cases/hammer-dagenhart.html
"Federal income tax, war-profits and excess-profits taxes" by George Edwin Holmeshttp://www.oyez.org/cases/1901-1939/1921/1921_657
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAchild.htm
http://www.shrm.org/LegalIssues/FederalResources/FederalStatutesRegulationsandGuidanc/Pages/Walsh-HealyActof1936.aspx
http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_laws.html

I chose to do a project on child labor laws, because as a 16-year-old, few laws have a bigger impact on me personally.  I think it's incredibly important to keep kids from neglecting schoolwork and personal growth in order to pursue money, especially now that popular movies and TV shows like Gossip Girl make it seem like it's normal for teenagers to live their lives completely independent of any adults.
I chose to present my project as a timeline because child labor laws didn't simply "happen" as a single event.  There were many events over numerous decades that led up to the anti-child labor legislation that we have today.  It would have been difficult to convey these in any other format without getting too complicated.
The biggest challenge in this project was actually just finding a way to make a timeline.  I went through seven online timeline-making sites, not counting Prezi, before I found Dipity.com.  It allows for some minimal formatting, it doesn't have absurdly low character limits, it allows for but doesn't require a start AND end date, it doesn't demand that I know the exact second of every event (looking at you, tiki-toki.com), it says I can use images and actually DOES let me use images, and it doesn't limit me to NINE events.  Unfortunately, Dipity is often slow and buggy.  At the moment, the whole site is down.
If I could do the whole project again, I would add more information about what happened after the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, such as data on literacy levels and income.  I might even include information about people who currently oppose child labor laws.  Utah Senator Mike Lee, for example, calls child labor laws "unconstitutional."
I was actually surprised at how easy it was to find helpful information on child labor laws.  Often, when I research a topic, every source tells me the same thing.  However, the history of child labor laws is so complicated that I found new details everywhere.  It also helped that the National Child Labor Committee commissioned thousands of photos of child labor, since it provided me with fantastic primary sources.