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How the Other Half Lives
How the Other Half Lives | Jacob A Riis
2 posts | 3 read | 10 to read
Jacob Riis's illustrated tour of New York's slums had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that changed the face of the city. In 1890, when the book was published, the Lower East Side was a landscape of teeming streets and filthy tenements crowded with immigrants living in dreadful conditions. How the Other Half Lives brings them to life - the Italians, Jews, Bohemians (Czechs and Slovaks), Blacks, and Chinese - in precise descriptions of their habits and traditions, jobs and wages, rents paid and meals eaten, and explores the effects of crime, poverty, alcohol, and lack of education and opportunity on adults and children alike. Riis's reliance on specific, hard facts as the tools and weapons of social criticism pioneered the style of crusading journalism that continues today. His use of photographs (reproduced in this edition) to put faces to his stories was a landmark in photojournalism.
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A.M.Pozon

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

- Jacob Riis

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Leftcoastzen
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#junebookbugs #Life Jacob Riis was one of the first to use photography to illustrate the plight of the underprivileged in NYC.Even shooting indoors with flash which was experimental at the time.Love the history of New York,every culture that came through added to the vibrant culture of the city.And the city's history is at its most interesting to me as told through the eyes of working people and its immigrants.

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