How the Other Half Lives: A Classic Study of Poverty, Tenement Life, and Reform in New York City - Hardcover

Riis, Jacob A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1515427188 ISBN 13: 9781515427186

Publisher: SMK Books, 2018

Synopsis

During 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 decided to publish a photojournal documenting these conditions using graphic descriptions, sketches, photographs, and statistics

Riis blamed the apathy of the monied class for the condition of the New York slums, and assumed that as people were made more aware of these conditions they would be motivated to help eradicate them.

About this title

About the Author

Jacob A. Riis was a Danish-born American journalist, photographer, lecturer, and social reformer whose work helped define modern documentary journalism. Born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1849, Riis emigrated to the United States as a young man and experienced poverty and insecurity before establishing himself as a newspaper reporter in New York City. His reporting on police work, tenement life, immigration, child poverty, and urban overcrowding gave him direct access to the conditions he later documented in How the Other Half Lives. The Library of Congress notes Riis's role in the history of tenement reform and his attention to the long struggle over conditions in neighborhoods such as Five Points and Mulberry Bend.Riis became one of the best-known reform journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using both words and images to make poverty visible to readers who might otherwise have ignored it. His work helped establish documentary photography as a tool of social witness, even as his writing also preserves many of the prejudices and reform assumptions of his time. How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890, remains his central work: a major text in American social history, urban reform, immigration history, photojournalism, and the literature of poverty in the modern city.

Edition details

• Publisher: SMK Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1515427188
• ISBN 13: 9781515427186
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 204