Film Analysis: The Orphan Train

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Orphan Train: Journey to the Unknown At the age of eight, Elliot Bobo was placed on a train headed to Arkansas. All he had was a cardboard suitcase filled with all of his worldly possessions which included only one change of clothes and no shoes. Elliot had no idea where he was going. When the train stopped in Arkansas, he and the other children on the train were instructed to get off the train and line up on a stage where adults inspected them, poked them, and looked them over to determine which child was best suited for whatever job these adults needed done on their farms or in their shops or cottage factories. Elliot and the other children, as described in the PBS documentary entitled “The Orphan Trains,” were “a source of cheap labor” (Tovares, par. 10). Well, consider this: Elliot’s mother dies when he was just two years old, and his alcoholic father had been raising him. The people who had loaded Elliot and thousands of other children onto trains bound for rural destinations in the mid-1800s through the early 1900s did so to save these children from a life of what the PBS documentary describes as a life of crime and disease to new beginnings with prospective parents in farming communities across the United States( Tovares, par.2). This was the beginning of what we know as the…show more content…
The topic of this speech is orphan trains, and I selected this topic after reading a brief historical account of this movement at the end of a fictional novel written by
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