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Review Of Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives

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How the Other Half Lives Jacob Riis, photojournalist and author of How the Other Half Lives depicts the unbearable living conditions of the New York City tenement taken place during the era of the Progression. How the Other Half Lives was written in first person, therefore, Riis’s research and writings came from events he experienced himself living in the tenements. Jacob Riis made photojournalism popular. He was a Danish immigrant along with being a social reformer and pioneer. Migration was one of the main causes to the overcrowding living situations of in New York City. Riis’s goal in composing his data was to inform the middle class and upper class on the living conditions of ones living in the terrible tenements. Jacob Riis collected his thoughts well in the writing of How the Other Half Lives. The book was very well put together and an engaging read. Although, Riis used numerous offensive words about several of the immigrants, however, years ago it was normal language describing many of the …show more content…

Their “large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.”(Riis 63-64) With Jacob Riis’s descriptive choice of words you could essentially vision the tenants that were many lived in the city. Crammed in spaces where two families could comfortably live in, ten families would live there instead. These living conditions were not healthy to say the least. The rooms did not see light of day because of lack of windows and the air in these buildings was not healthy air to be inhaling. The tenants living in these conditions believed that this was their only option for

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In 1870, Riis emigrated to the United States and spent the next years wandering the northeastern part of the country. He didn 't have a stable job so when he obtained a job as a police reporter for the New York Tribune his life turned around. He took a position with the Evening Sun, then through his newspaper work he became closely familiar with New York 's poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. In the 19th century, he started exposing the life of the lower class in New York city. In How the other half lives by Jacob Riis, he discusses how the half that was on top really didn 't care much about other than themselves and how the poor suffer.

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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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Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago.

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In the book “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob A. Riis, the author’s main purpose for writing this book was to provide a voice for the hard-working people who had to live in these poor living conditions. The author believed that any hard-working man’s story should be told and that’s exactly what he wanted to do with this book. I believe he was successful at doing this because not only did the author provide a voice for these people, but he also was able to inform the public and government about the horrific living conditions in which they were living in. Jacob August Riis was born on May 3rd, 1849 in Denmark, and he migrated to the United States in 1870. Jacob had different jobs here in the U.S. one of them was as a police reporter for the New York Tribune (Jacob, “Contemporary”).

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