Social Reformer: Jacob Riis

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Social Reformer: Jacob Riis By: Michelle Cisneros Jacob August Riis, writer of How the Other Half Lives (1890) has recently died, May 26, 1941. Born on May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark, he was one of 14 siblings and grew up understanding financial struggle. Riis immigrated to the United States at the age of 21 in hopes of starting a new life after a failed marriage proposal. After coming from the steamship Iowa he also found himself working various jobs in New York City: he was a bricklayer, a salesman, and more just to get by. He personally knew the hardships many immigrants felt coming to a new land since he came with hardly anything other than 40 dollars and the clothes he wore. It wasn’t until 1873 when Riis became the police reporter for The New York Tribune witnessing the slums and tenements of Urban Americans, that Riis felt a personal connection to the immigrants living in horrible conditions and he decided to use what he witnessed at work as a way to create change. During one of his nights at work, Riis decided to come in contact with a photographer hoping to capture the horrors where the lower class of America lived. In the end, Riis was not pleased with the outcome of the photos and decided to show people the truth himself. He purchased a box camera and learned to create a flash, which at one point almost blinded him. He compiled the photos of the people living in the slums by their ethnicity but never mentioning their names. His book How the Other Half Lives captured the attention of many including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was so moved by the photos that he said, “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” This would lead to the changes he sought. Riis along with other reformers such as Jessie Tarbox Beals and Lewis Hines used photography to shine light on the poor condition of the tenement houses. Soon the Tenement House Law was passed in 1901, which would reinforce city house policies that ordered more sanitation regulation. .

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Ethics in Photojournalism: Past, Present, and Future
Ethics in Photojournalism: Past, Present, and Future By Daniel R. Bersak S.B. Comparative Media Studies & Electrical Engineering/Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEPTEMBER, 2006 Copyright 2006 Daniel R. Bersak, All Rights Reserved The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: _____________________________________________________ Department of Comparative Media Studies, August 11, 2006 Certified By: ___________________________________________________________ Edward Barrett Senior Lecturer, Department of Writing Thesis Supervisor Accepted By: __________________________________________________________ William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies Director Ethics In Photojournalism: Past, Present, and Future By Daniel R. Bersak Submitted to the Department of Comparative Media Studies, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences on August 11, 2006, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies Abstract Like writers and editors, photojournalists are held to a standard of ethics. Each publication has a set of rules, sometimes written, sometimes unwritten, that governs what that publication considers to be a truthful and faithful representation of images to the public. These rules cover a wide range of topics such as how a photographer should act while taking pictures, what he or she can and can’t photograph, and whether and how an image can be altered in the darkroom or on the computer.
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Name: ___(ANSWER KEY)___ Hour: ______ Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives Introduction The rapid growth of industrialization in the United States of the 1880s created an intense need for labor. The flood of tens of thousands of people— of them immigrants— northeastern cities created a housing problem of major proportions. Landlords, rushing to realize quick profits, persisted in subdividing their apartments into ever smaller units, forcing the poor into increasingly overcrowded living conditions. In the late 1880s, Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, began writing articles for the New York Sun that described the realities of life in New York City's slums. Riis was one of the first reporters to use flash photography, allowing him to take candid photos of living conditions among the urban poor. In 1890, he published How the Other Half Lives, illustrated with line drawings based on his photographs. Riis's work helped spark a new approach to reporting called "muckraking" that eventually led to the Progressive Era reform movements to improve these conditions. Here is an excerpt from Riis's book. How the Other Half Lives The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretence of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretences. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears.
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Riis's How the Other Half Lives
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Jacob Riis and the Jews the Ambivalent Quest for Community Louis Fried
Jacob riis and the jews the ambivalent quest for community louis fried There have been few figures in American immigrant history who more tirelessly expounded upon the nature of Americanization than Jacob Riis. Against the steady growth of a disenchanting critical realism assessing the costs of estrangement in American life, Riis continually pointed out how the immigrant's past could comport well with his present. Riis' very achievements—and they surely were no mean ones—led him as well as such differing figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln Steffens, and Jane Robbins to see his life invested with a culturally significant form, one worthy of emulation.1 As James Lane, Riis' most re cent and astute biographer, has suggested, his importance .can be traced to his bridging "the gap between the two Americas that he confronted as an immigrant";2 he had hoped that a divided America, one rich and one poor, could "evolve into an organic unity."3 Riis' works can be read to indicate that such a hope was not delusive. His studies of the slums (Hoiu the Other Half Lives, 1890; A Ten Years' War, 1900; The Battle with the Slum, 1902), his portrayal of and tales about tenement youth (The Children of the Poor, 1892; Out of Mulberry Street, 1898), his exhortation about the family (The Peril and Preservation of the Home, 1903), his memoirs (The Making of an American, 1901; The Old Town, 1909), and his venture in campaign biography (Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen, 1903) are all of a kind. As a whole, they con- firm his belief that American promises of civil liberties and social free dom would erode the narrow sectarianism of the European past if they could be nurtured.
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Jacob a Riis: Revealing New York's
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Leann Atwood Iron Springs Elementary [email protected] Tenement Living
LeAnn Atwood Iron Springs Elementary [email protected] Tenement Living - “How the Other Half Lives” Objective: Students will use Jacob Riis’ novel, How the Other Half Lives, to see what life was like to many poor immigrants during the 1890’s. Students will understand that primary sources can help us to understand people, places, and events from the past. Background Information about How the Other Half Lives - from Wikipedia: 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,[1] he published 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. In 1889 Riis wrote a magazine article exposing some of the harsh conditions of New York slums which was published with a number of engravings of his photographs in Scribner's Magazine.[2] Due to its disturbing pictures and articles, the city's rich newspaper owners had refused to publish it.[citation needed] 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.[2] The book was also successful.
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Gilded Age New York As Seen by Famous Contemporaries
Act Sci Soc 35 (2012): 19–26 Gilded Age New York as Seen by Famous Contemporaries Tatiana Viktorovna Pantyukhina* Abstract The paper deals with the perception of turn-of-the-twentieth-century- New York City by two outstanding New Yorkers of that time—Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis. Both made their mark in the history of the city. For both of them New York was a launch pad for their careers. Roosevelt and Riis completed comprehensive research works on the history of contemporary New York. The paper analyses their major works: Roosevelt’s “New York: a sketch of the city’s social, political, and commercial progress from the first Dutch settlement to recent times” and Riis’ “How the Other Half Lives.” Keywords Jacob Riis, New York, working classes New York City has always held a special place among American cities. A gateway to the USA, a dominant urban center since 1800, the embodiment of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, the city has attracted one of the largest populations in the world. New York’s economic institutions eclipsed domestic competitors by the early nineteenth century and foreign competitors after the First World War. One of the most dramatic and eventful periods of the city’s history was the turn of the twentieth century. By that time, New York ranked first in the country by every important measure—from population to industrial output to bank deposits to whole- sale trade. Besides, New York was the national headquarters for the modern business structure—the corporation. These achievements were hugely impressive since New York was not a national or even a state capital.
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Biography: Jacob Riis by Newsela Staff
→ Mark your confusion. → Purposefully annotate the article (1-2 mature, thoughtful responses per page to what the author is saying) → Write a 250+ word response to the article. (If you are a teacher or student who would like to modify this Google Doc, go to File > Make a Copy. I cannot and do not respond to Share requests -- my apologies!) Biography: Jacob Riis By Newsela Staff Synopsis: Reformer and journalist Jacob Riis was born in Denmark in 1849, and immigrated to New York in 1870. He was unable to find work, and he soon found himself homeless, living in police lodging houses and begging for food. The conditions in the lodging houses were so bad that Riis vowed to get them closed. Eventually, Riis landed a job as a police reporter. He worked in the poorest, most crime-ridden areas of the city and began to bring a camera with him to document what he found in these neighborhoods, and the conditions in which these people lived. For this, Riis is considered to be one of the fathers of modern photojournalism. His book "How the Other Half Lives" inspired then-police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to close the lodging houses. It also brought about many needed reforms in housing laws. So important was Riis’ work that Roosevelt called him "New York’s most useful citizen." Early Life Jacob A. Riis was born in Denmark in 1849, and he immigrated to America at age 20. As a young new immigrant, alone, homeless and struggling to find work — with only a stray dog as a companion on the street — Jacob Riis was the victim of crime at a police lodging house.
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If Jacob Riis Had Lived at Hull-House
Rima Lunin Schultz, ed.. Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007. x + 178 pp. $50.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-252-03134-2. Reviewed by Ruth Crocker Published on H-SHGAPE (January, 2008) The appearance of a new edition of Hull- tion and from professions open to their male House Maps and Papers, frst published in 1895, peers such as medicine or the ministry, women suggests the continuing fascination of scholars resident in the settlement houses engaged both in with the famous Chicago settlement house and its social research and social work (the term was founder, Jane Addams. It joins a number of im‐ new). The settlements served as an arena for pro‐ portant new studies of Hull-House and its reform ducing social knowledge and as centers for the re‐ circle by biographers, historians, and moral form campaigns fueled by that new knowledge.[2] philosophers.[1] This edition, the frst since the New interest by scholars in the early years of Arno Press reprint of 1970, is welcome for its American social science makes the reissue of Hull- thoughtful extended introduction by Rima Lunin House Maps and Papers particularly timely. Hull- Schultz, assistant director of the Jane Addams House Maps and Papers is clearly part of the liter‐ Hull-House Museum, and for the eight full-color ature of reform--Rima Schultz calls it "a major maps showing wage and ethnicity data accompa‐ work of sociological investigation and analysis" nying what has been described as the frst social (p.
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How the Other Half Lives”
Jacob Riis Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” A Library of Congress Exhibition April 14–September 5, 2016 Thomas Jefferson Building Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was a journalist and social reformer who publicized the crises in housing, education, and poverty at the height of European immigration to New York City in the late nineteenth century. His career as a reformer was shaped by his innovative use of photographs of New York’s slums to substantiate his words and vividly expose the realities of squalid living and working conditions faced by the inhabitants. Harrowing images of tenements and alleyways where New York’s immigrant communities lived, combined with his evocative storytelling, were intended to engage and inform his audience and exhort them to act. Riis helped set in motion an activist legacy linking photojournalism with reform. This exhibition repositions Riis as a multi-skilled communicator who devoted his life to writing articles and books, delivering lectures nationwide, and doggedly advocating for social change. Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” features Riis’s correspondence, documentary photographs, drafts and published works, lecture notes, scrapbook pages, appointment books, financial records, family history, and alliances from throughout his career. The side walls of the exhibition frame Riis’s call to action on problems he focused on as a reporter—housing, homelessness, public space, immigration, education, crime, public health, and labor. These pressing issues remain at the forefront of many public debates today. By merging, for the first time, the papers the Riis family gifted to the Library of Congress and his photographs in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives” provides visitors with an unprecedented opportunity to understand the indelible mark Riis’s brand of social reform left upon our vision of humanity and poverty in the urban landscape as the Gilded Age shifted into the Progressive Era.
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Exhibition Reference Materials Bibliography & Media Resources
Exhibition Reference Materials Bibliography & Media Resources Materials accompanying the exhibition are marked with an asterisk (*). Primary Sources Baker, Sara Josephine. Fighting for Life. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1939. *Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890. Read a Classic 2010 edition. Riis, Jacob. The Children of the Poor. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908. *Riis, Jacob. The Making of an American. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901. CreateSpace 2016 edition. Wald, Lillian. The House on Henry Street. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1925. Secondary Sources Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Davis, Allen F. Spearheads for Reform, The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Dolkart, Andrew. Biography of a Tenement House in New York City. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Jaffe, Steven H. and Jessica Lautin. Capital of Capital: Money, Banking and Power in New York City, 1784-2012. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986. Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. *Yochelson, Bonnie and Daniel Czitrom. Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century. New York: New Press, 2007. Yochelson, Bonnie. Jacob Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. The Programming Guide for Jacob A. Riis: How the Other Half Lives 1 ©2017 NEH on the Road, a national program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mid-America Arts Alliance Books for Young Readers Brennan, Patricia Demuth.
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