Each year, thousands of Americans and international tourists visit the Capitol building in Washington, DC. These visitors view the activity on the House and Senate floor from the galleries and see pages darting back and forth, but what are they doing and why are teenagers working in the Capitol building?<BR><BR>From the origins of the Page system in 1774 to the period in the 1940s when Congress demonstrated an indifference towards the needs of providing the boys with supervised living arrangements, congressional Pages have a storied past. It's a topic that can be amusing---for years, Pages simply treated the Capitol as their private playground to subject adults to their mischief---and sobering, as Congress continued to employ boys as young as eight years old, even after passing labor laws that prohibited it.<BR><BR>Unlike many dry and lifeless books about Congressional history, The Children Who Ran for Congress: A history of Congressional pages provides a lively and engaging look at the history of the page system, a topic that has largely been ignored. Based on a thorough investigation of historical documents and personal interviews, Darryl Gonzalez now tells the complete story of the young boys (and girls) who have served Congress for more than 200 years.