Jacob Riis Essay

“Publicize the plight of impoverished children”. Riis immigrated to the United States in 1870, found sporadic work as a casual laborer, then eventually landed a job as a newspaper reporter. Riis authored several books documenting the life of the urban poor in the crowded slums of New York. His use of photography visually depicted the filth and unsanitary conditions that

Though people did have their right to vote they often did not have the freedom to choose whom they wanted to vote for. Jacob Riis was a popular political cartoonist in New York, one of Riis' most famous pieces "The Power behind the Throne". He depicted William Tweed the leader of Tammany Hall as king for his shady accumulation of power. Tweed became a powerful New York politician by promising immigrants

Jacob August Riis wasn’t just another immigrant from the industrial revolution. He was a photojournalist. Someone that took pictures and wrote about them that caused a change in American society. But, to begin with he was from Ribe, Denmark, born on May 3, 1849, being the third of fifteen children. Growing up, he was a never a schoolboy but enjoyed reading. His father being a editor of local newspaper had influenced him from a young age to be how he was when he grown up. Though, the death of his

Lives by Jacob Riis astonished the middle and upper class Americans. Riis revealed to the world the horrific living conditions of New York City’s tenement housing. He did this by the use of graphic photographs (that he himself took) and detailed written descriptions which are all first-hand accounts, as he was a witness to whatever he wrote. After reading the novel one might question how are the poor subjected to such harsh living conditions and also how the environment affects them. Riis reveals

Jacob Riis was a journalist who made a big impact on society during the progressive era. He managed to open the eyes of the wealthy and showed them the brutal conditions of the poor in New York City during the progressive era. All the way from the time he was very young, he was helping people in need. His background from where he grew up definitely impacted his motives behind his causes. Jacob Riis altered society in a big way during the early 1900s. Motivation Riis was inspired by his past experiences

First of all, Jacob Riis is the author of “How the Other Side lives”. He was famous for using photography to document the extremely poor conditions of many poor populations in the early 20th century. Riis was a Danish immigrant, he worked as a police reporter for The New York Tribune, a job that gave him a close and personal relationship with Mulberry Bend, a vestige of Five Points, the most infamous slum in the city. This book reveals the dirt, disease and misery associated with the living in the

Through his brilliant journalism and vivid photography, Jacob Riis exposes the horrifying living conditions of the New York tenements in How the Other Half Lives. With the excess inflow of immigrants into the United States in the 19th century, New York City (a very popular port) became tremendously overcrowded. The city did not adapt well to the increasing population and thus warehouses and homes meant for just one family were often divided into numerous rooms for dozens of people. These impoverished

Understanding the state of poverty to the other half of people that struggled to live day-to-day is hard to fully grasp. In the Novel, “How the Other Half Lives”, Jacob Riis tells us from first hand experience about the disturbing stories and facts on the countless number of poverty and hardship that New York City saw in the 18th and 19th century. Riis was born in Denmark, immigrated to New York in 1870 and describes from first hand experience the hope New York City gave immigrants coming from across the

Whereas Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis establishes a connection between the American dream, disappointment, and lack of satisfaction in the middle class, How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis exposes the gap between the poverty, unsightly and dangerous conditions of the poor and the uncaring or uneducated middle- and upper-class in the context of New York. Set in the 1920s, the period in America following World War I that is considered materialistic and depraved, Babbitt captures the political and personal

Jacob Riis, an immigrant from Denmark and the author and photographer of How the Other Half Lives, is no exception to this reality. Riis, in his book, tries to convince reformers to do something about the poor, urban slums of which many immigrants lived. He has many images depicting the conditions in these slums, however none of them completely tell the whole story. For example, as a Christian, Riis incorporates his moral beliefs into his pictures of the slums. Riis believed that stable