Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant to New York City in the late 1800s, was a photographer that documented the harsh conditions of the working class in the late 19th century. He released a photo-journal book in 1890 entitled How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. He illuminated the dark, cramped quarters and incredibly dirty conditions of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The publication invigorated social activism and pushed for improved housing legislation and standards.
Riis’ work in New York City’s Lower East Side slums drew the attention of London’s elite and eugenic reformers. Images of “infants and toddlers playing with scraps of rubbish on open tenement landings, kicking rotten vegetables around sun-starved courts and alleys, or lying stricken with fever in grossly overcrowded rented rooms” struck a nerve. Proposals to increase citywide expenditures in London’s poorest areas and to relocate the poor to
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The country was as equally impoverished as the city. Beginning in the late 1880s, England entered what would become a deep agricultural crisis. England’s once thriving farms were being abandoned. Some of the reasons for the decline can be attributed to poor harvests, strengthening overseas competition, cheap imports, and the growing availability of land in the United States and Australasia. The declining number of British farmers “reduced cereal acreage in England and Wales by one quarter between 1879 and 1900.” Essentially there were no incentives to farm in England. The Duke of Marlborough predicted in 1885 “if there were any effective demand, half the land of England would be on the market tomorrow.” Statistically, the Duke was not far off. In 1902, Hertfordshire, in southern England, had 20 percent of its farms vacant. Apart from foreign agricultural competition and the attraction of available land overseas, many English farmers moved to London to fill the increasing demand for factory
Jacob A Riis said “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives” (1) in the introduction of his great book How the Other Half Lives, which was published in 1890. It was simply because the one half did not care how the other half lived. Although unknowing how the other half lives had not been a matter, it brought into relief the gap between people over middle-class and the poor around 1900s in New York City where was the youngest city in the world.
Farmers’ incomes were low, and in order to make a profit on what they produced, they begun to expand the regions in which they sold their products in. This was facilitated through the railroads, by which through a series of grants from the government as...
The novel How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis shocked middle and upper class Americans when it was published in 1890. Riis created a sensation when he revealed to the world, combining detailed written descriptions with graphic photographs, the horrific conditions of New York City’s tenement housing. How the Other Half Lives raises many questions, such as how and why the poor are subjected to such terrible living conditions and how that environment affects them. Riis also reveals his fears and prejudices toward certain ethnic groups as he investigates each tenement in order to find some kind of solution. The miserable surroundings Riis discusses throughout the length of his entire document focus on the tenement.
Jacob Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives is a detailed description on the poor and the destitute in the inner realms of New York City. Riis tries to portray the living conditions through the ‘eyes’ of his camera. He sneaks up on the people flashes a picture and then tells the rest of the city how the ‘other half’ is living. As shocking as the truth was without seeing such poverty and horrible conditions with their own eyes or taking in the experience with all their senses it still seemed like a million miles away or even just a fairy tale.
The country at the time was in the deepest and soon to be longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world and this caused years of over-cultivation of wheat, because “during the laissez-faire, expansionist 1920’s the plains were extensively and put to wheat - turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced highly unprecedented harvests” (Worster 12). ¬The farmer’s actions were prompted by the economic decline America was facing. With the economy in a recession, farmers were looking for a way to make a living and in 1930 wheat crop were becoming very popular. In 1931 the wheat crop was considered a bumper crop with over twelve million bushels of wheat. Wheat was emerging all over the plains. The wheat supply forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/bushel in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/bushel in July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields, but most decided to stay despite the unfavorable
By the late nineteenth century the economic lines in America between the upper and lower class were quickly widening because of the boom of urban industrial expansion. Moreover, during the 1800s, America witnessed an influx of immigrants coming from many parts of the world, they made tenement houses in New York’s lower East Side a common destination. One person witnessing the living conditions of these tenements was journalist Jacob A. Riis. For several years, Riis, with camera in hand, tooked a multitude of photographs that depicted the atrocious working and living conditions in the New York slums. Riss reported that the tenements were severely overcrowded, unsanitary, and a breeding ground for crime and disease. Riss also claimed that the “slum” landlords of these tenements exploited immigrants by charging them more rent than they could afford. As a result, every member of the family had to work—even young children. Subsequently, in 1890, Riis wrote a book entitled: How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, which included his horrifying photographs and sketches, as means to expose to the middle class the chaotic environment of tenement living. Although Riss’s book exposes a myriad of social and economic problems regarding tenement housing, one of the more prominent ills his photographs and prose reveal is the harsh and distressing reality that immigrant families from the lower class must treat their children as a form of labor in order to survive. With this in mind, by describing and analyzing three of Riis’s photographs, I will demonstrate the validity of my argument which portrays the exploitation of child labor.
The period between 1880 and 1900 was a boom time for American Politics. The country was finally free of the threat of war, and many of its citizens were living comfortably. However, as these two decades went by, the American farmer found it harder and harder to live comfortably. Crops such as cotton and wheat, once the sustenance of the agriculture industry, were selling at prices so low that it was nearly impossible for farmers to make a profit off them. Furthermore, improvement in transportation allowed foreign competition to materialize, making it harder for American farmers to dispose of surplus crop. Mother Nature was also showing no mercy with grasshoppers, floods, and major droughts that led to a downward spiral of business that devastated many of the nation’s farmers. As a result of the agricultural depression, numerous farms groups, most notably the Populist Party, arose to fight what the farmers saw as the reasons for the decline in agriculture. During the final twenty years of the nineteenth century, many farmers in the United States saw monopolies and trusts, railroads, and money shortages and the loss in value of silver as threats to their way of life, all of which could be recognized as valid complaints.
During the Gilded Age, the streets where the poor lived were inhumane. There were many people that lived on the streets or in tenements in poor condition. Jacob Riis, a photographer, exposed “the
Urban growth became increasingly popular in the late nineteenth century due to the fact of industry on the rise. Urban growth brought on many unsafe living places for many people. Jacob Riis was a photographer who snapped some pictures of the living conditions of some people in the city. He is able to convey in these pictures how people slept or did their laundry or even stayed warm. Riis was able to show the rest of the world, including the higher classes, how the lower classes lived and worked and learned.
In 1890 Jacob Riis, a Danish migrant and New York Times reported introduced the immigrant problem to Americans using photojournalism in his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. This book provided insight into the harsh lives of the immigrants living in the slums of New York by giving photographic evidence that spoke to the hearts of many Americans. At the time many were unaware of the difficult challenges many immigrants faced and Riis brought up this social issue. Riis himself however has some bias and delineates these people into groups of the “deserving poor” and “undeserving poor”. Despite his muckraking skills and attempts to reveal the hostile conditions of immigrants Riis has some racial prejudices
Jacob Riis is clearly a trained historian since he was given an education to become a change in the world-- he was a well educated American newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer who, with his book How the Other Half Lives, shocked the conscience of his readers with factual descriptions of slum conditions in New York City. In 1870, Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States without any economic resources and unable to find a source of income to help him. This leads to his perceptions about the topic because he also states in the book that the various jobs he occupied were low paying and he experienced poverty in the city of New York as well, yet for a short period of time. Riis mentions the injustice of unsanitary and dangerous
The effect from both the Dust Bowl drought and the Great Depression made it hard on farmers in the early 1900’s; it was hard for farmers to produce crops (“The Ultimate AP US History”). Farmers with small businesses were forced to end
The Roaring Twenties approached and the citizens in Colorado were facing rough times. In 1920, many people such as farm owners, manufacturers, and even miners were having a hard time making a living due to an economic downfall. The farmers especially, where facing the toughest of times. The price of various farm-grown goods like wheat, sugar beets, and even cattle was dropping because their goods were no longer needed by the public. Wheat had dropped in price from $2.02 in 1918 to $0.76 by the time 1921 came around. Sadly, the land that they were using to grow wheat became dry and many farmers had to learn to grow through “dryland farming” which became very popular in the eastern plains from 1910 to 1930 (Hard Times: 1920 - 1940). Apple trees began to die due to the lack of desire for apples, poor land, and decreased prices. Over the course of World War I, the prices of farm goods began to increase slowly. Farmers were not the only one facing this economic hardship while others in big cities were enjoying the Roaring Twenties.
I also find it interesting how Rivoli described the conditions of a garment worker. She described a child in Vietnam chained to a sewing machine without access to food or water, and spoke about a young girl from India who earned 18 cents per hour and is allowed to visit the bathroom only twice per day. This young girl lived in a room with 12 other girls; she shares a bed and only has gruel to eat. She is forced to work 90 hours each week, without overtime pay, and lives not only in poverty, but also in filth and sickness.
It is to be noted that farmers in England are among the most productive farmers in the world. The new methods of farming brought mass production in the early 18th century, leading to the Agricultural revolution. “In the early eighteenth century, Britain exported wheat, rising from 49,000 quarters in 1700 to a massive peak of 950,000 quarters in 1750”. The whole benefit of the Agricultural revolution was shared among aristocratic landholders. They were the only top authorities, as the English throne was already overthrown by the aristocratic class in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution.... ...