“I don’t know how old I am. . . . I began to work when I was about 9. I first worked

“I don’t know how old I am. . . . I began to work when I was about 9. I first worked for a man who used to hit me with a belt. . . . I used to sleep in the pits that had no more coal in them; I used to eat whatever I could get; I ate for a long time the candles that I found in the pits. . . .” — E. Royston Pike, 1896, adapted from Hard Times, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution from the NYS Global History and Geography Regents Exam, June 2002.

Identify the best use of this document for a historian.