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Summary Of Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives

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Jacob Riis was a social reformer who wrote a novel “How the Other Half Lives.” This novel was about the poverty of Lower East Side of New York. After writing this novel views about New York completely changed. Jacob himself knew how it felt to all of these poor people he wrote about because he himself was homeless, and starving all the time. At one point he considering suicide because of the awful living conditions of the city. Later on down the road Jacob Riis become a police reporter which gave him the opportunity to research and write about the city slums or Lower East Side of New York. He focused on getting everyone to actually pay attention to what is happening in their community and after his book came out they did. He also showed/ took …show more content…

He talks about how people were living in just plain filth, and how it was always dark. Riis also takes pictures of all the awful areas and conditions. The one picture of the little boy standing against the wall in fifth and all by himself really hit me hard. I am an Education major so whenever I see a kid in a bad situation like that it hits my heart really hard. I am not saying that doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t matter because they do. All the pictures Riis took I feel really portrayed poverty like no other. The subject of Riis work is the poor people living in the lower east side of New York. I think Riis work helps us understand the late 19th century in a very meaningful way. I believe this because of the words he uses like “filth” and all the photos he took all of the individuals sleeping on the stairs or really wherever they could find it. I think all of this would and does hit everyone really hard and makes me really think about how it was back …show more content…

There are all kinds of crimes happening including murder, robbery, grant theft auto, and rape. I live in Gardendale, AL which is about 20 min. north of Birmingham. It is a really small town and not much happens, but every day I go to school I come to Birmingham and sometimes worry about what’s going on a few streets down, off campus. Sometimes it is scary to go to Birmingham and defiantly at night because of all the stories you here about. I also think Birmingham has a lot of poverty just like in the 1890-1910 times. All throughout Birmingham you see homeless people walking around, shelters for those in need, and honestly just some really horrific places to live and be in. Just like Riis wrote the “How the other half lives” and got his community to see how the other side of city lives. I think we should all work to make our community better than what it is

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Article 2 Jacob Riis and how he changed the world. Jacob Riis was influential and life changing to the americans rich and poor of the late 19th century. Jacob Riis’s photos of the slums and tenement shocked thousands. His photography completely changed the minds of the rich and strongly motivated the progressive movement. Round Riis never directly created or change any laws but he laid the groundwork and the mindset need to create these changes.

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1244 Words | 5 Pages

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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The Truth About Many Jews Ellie Wiesel once said, “Without Passion, without haste.” The people in this true story were all treated like they were so much less than everyone else in the world. None of them had names that they went by anymore they just went by being called stupid Jews by the people who ran the camps. The things that had happened to these people were so unbelieveable. Millions of Jews were forced to cut their hair and were compared to dogs, or even sometimes called dogs.

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Nikodem Dupre 5/20/18 After the Fact by James West Davidson is a text on the various methods a historian has at his disposal to help interpret the events of the past. The authors are both historians and History professors specializing in American history, and they draw from the historical backdrop of the Assembled States to give delineations of the ideas they look to depict. One example is how Jacob Riis in Chapter 9 helped shaped the low income working class. Riis had started capturing the insides and outsides of New York ghettos with a glimmer light.

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What kind of world do we live in? In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, the reader learns how Jews were treated during the Holocaust, how blind the world was, and how survivors’ lives were forever changed. This book goes through many optical and is a really good book to read and learn about all those things. What would happen if society knew what was actually going on in the world?

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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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The Poverty-stricken area is filled with death and sickness. He describes it as a horrible place to have to live and work with starving orphans and many sick and dying people living in morbid conditions. The waste filled streets and fire prone buildings were just a regular thing for the people living under the poverty line. 2.) The story takes place in the slums of New York City.

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Though both authors wrote based on their own personal experiences. Upton Sinclair went undercover as a worker in these factories and wrote of what he saw, while Jacob Riis went to tenements, wrote or took pictures of what he saw. These two authors were trying to create change. They knew that the workers and the poor living in these tenements couldn’t go anything. So who else to help besides the public?

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The documentary asserts how these deprived people are forced to live in these subpar conditions. For example, many scenes in the documentary display that housing is scarce and the little housing that is available on the reserve is falling apart into pieces. Families are having to paying rent for years after years before they can claim that house their home. It is unfortunate to watch one struggle with housing when a couple miles south there are enormous houses being built just for show and hardly any tenants living in them. The urban house market revolves around the almighty dollar and instead of building basic homes for people on reserves to live in, the

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The late 19th century consisted of rigid work hours for children, the growth of strikes, and the use of yellow journalism. It was a challenging time for anyone below the upper class to live in. This is demonstrated throughout Newsies, a Broadway Musical displaying the challenges from this time period. Child labor, a major part of the movie, was the way of life and consisted of young children doing hard work as a vital part of the nation’s economy and income of families of the time. Another part of the movie, strikes, were the people’s way of refusing to work as a result of not getting their desires.

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He sees African American youths finding the points of confinement put on them by a supremacist society at the exact instant when they are finding their capacities. The narrator talks about his association with his more youthful sibling, Sonny. That relationship has traveled

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When he first arrived the narrator began searching for jobs but was blacklisted by the dean of his college. He later found a job at a paint company where he was later fired the same day. These multiple encounters with injustice gave him a strong sense of “dispossession.” This lead to him joining this club called “The Brotherhood.” His goal while in this organization was to bring justice to the “dispossessed” people of Harlem.

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A Time for Struggle and Change Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, depicts the struggles of Lithuanian immigrants as they worked and lived in Chicago’s Packingtown at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The United States experienced an enormous social and political transformation; furthermore, the economy, factories, and transportation industry grew faster than anyone had ever seen. Immigrants and migrants were attracted to city life for its promise of employment and their chance at the American Dream. The poor working class had little to no rights, and they grappled with unfair business practices, unsafe working conditions, racism, Social Darwinism, class segregation, xenophobia, political corruption, strikes, starvation, poor housing,

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He descriptively tells the readers he grew up in a state of chaos due to war and that he did not have a peaceful childhood compared to normal kids. While he was afraid of the soldiers who are “strolling the streets and alleys” (line 8), the untroubled child in him was afraid of the “boarded-up well in the backyard” (line 4). Here, he contrasts the idea of home and foreign place by presenting different experiences that a child faced. He is showing an event that caused him to have fragmented self. He hints the readers lack of personal belonging because he has experienced war in his early youth.

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