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How The Other Half Lives Chapter Summaries

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How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle classes.
History and contents
In the 1890s many people in upper- and middle-class society were unaware of the dangerous conditions in the slums among poor immigrants. Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who himself could not originally find much work, hoped to expose the squalor of the 19th-century Lower East Side of Manhattan. After a successful career as a police reporter, he published a photojournal documenting these conditions using graphic descriptions, sketches, photographs, and statistics. Riis blamed the apathy of the monied class for the …show more content…

Due to its disturbing pictures and articles, the city's rich newspaper owners had refused to publish it. Yet soon the article proved to be popular and Riis spent the better part of a year expanding it into the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, published by Scribner's Books in 1890.
The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer François Rabelais, who famously wrote in Pantagruel: "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" .
In How the Other Half Lives Riis describes the system of tenement housing that had failed, as he claims, due to greed and neglect from wealthier people. He claims a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behaviour of the poor and their lack of a proper home. Chapter by chapter he uses his words and photographs to expose the conditions inhabited by the poor in a manner that “spoke directly to people's

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Jacob Riis’s books change the life of the poor. Riis brought into light, the worst of the worst. These horrible conditions were never talked about or mentioned by anyone in the mass public until Riis’s book was published. Not only were his descriptions horribly real and detailed, but his photographs

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The muckrakers were investigative writer during the progressive Era, who wrote about different economic and social issues, such as: monopole of standard oil, children labor, work exploitation, and politic corruption. They criticized the corruption and inequality in the system. Trying to rise the public awareness and to mobilize the interest of the public to fight for change, the muckrakers published books, cartoons and articles in newspapers. Among them was, Jacob Riis who write “How The Other Half Lives” and Upton Sinclair, the author of “The

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How the Other Half Lives is a point by point portrayal on poor people and the penniless in the internal domains of New York City. Riis tries to depict the living conditions through the 'eyes' of his camera. He sneaks up on the general population flashes a photo and afterward tells whatever remains of the city how the 'other half' is living. As stunning as the fact of the matter was without seeing such neediness and awful conditions with their own particular eyes or taking in the involvement with every one of their faculties regardless it appeared like a million miles away or even only a fable. The truth of this book hit the general population of New York directly between the

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The Second Tenement House Act closed a loophole, set by the first one, by requiring windows to face a source of fresh air and light, not just a hallway. In 1901, after Riis’ book “How The Other Half Lives” was published, the government made it mandatory to follow the strict guidelines addressed in the New York State Tenement Housing Act. This meant improvement with the sewage systems, indoor plumbing and garbage collection. After the great success of his book, Riis career of social reform was launched.

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Middle and upper class Americans were shocked by the novel How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Riis depicted the true grit of immigrant life when he depicted, mixing in depth written imagery and raw photography, the horrendous conditions of New York City\'s tenement housing. Many questions were raised in America by How the Other Half Lives, including: how and why the poor are condemned to these bad living conditions and how this atmosphere affects them. Ben Franklin Ben Franklin: Early Life In his many careers as a printer, moralist, essayist, civic leader, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, and philosopher, for later generations of Americans he became both a ...

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Riis alluded to many conditions that those who lived in tenements had to deal with on a daily basis, although his writing was often racist and stereotypical, generalizing many groups of people. However, Riis did do justice to the horrors that the “Other Half” experienced, informing those who did not live there or did not know much about the actual living

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Riis did research on people that lived in overcrowded homes and in bad condition, he investigate by seeing the role of the government in these neighborhoods he went through police and hospital record and found out that people were getting sick, especially children were mostly affected. Riis focused and saw that the living condition were unhealthy and unsanitary, that the apartment lacked pluming and proper ventilation. He found records that showed death rate in specific neighborhood in the city in 1888 he saw that death rate that year was 26.27 percent (Riis, p. 33). Not only was their high rate of diseases high, but also a high rate of criminality was high. In the city, there were many types of single guys the adventurous, the lonely and criminals who were socializing people in a negative way that

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