| Abstract: | Jacob Riis was born in 1849 in Denmark and arrived at the Port of New York in 1870. After seven years of semi-poverty he became a police reporter covering the tenements on the city's east side. During the post-Civil War period industrialization, urbanization, and immigration had combined to undermine living conditions in the quickly growing cities of America. It was about life in the tenements of these cities that Riis wrofe.HisHow the Other Half Lives had a major impact on the nation, drawing attention to the terrible conditions of the lives that were led in the tenements. The excerpt reprinted here, like the rest of the book, forced the nation to see what it was doing to its children.Riis's work can be seen as part of the great turn-of-the-century effort from which the social sciences and social welfare services emerged, or it can still function as a prod to action, raising indignation on behalf of the children of the 1990s, as it did for those of the 1890s.Reprinted with permission fromHow the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, by Jacob A. Riis. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. |
