How the Other Half Lives

English · 8h 5m · Biography & Autobiography, Essays & Short Works, Social Science

Jacob Riis was a Danish photojournalist whose groundbreaking book documented the lives and struggles of working people – many of them recent immigrants – in New York in the late 1880s. His narrative is sensitive but unsparing, and filled with intimate portraits of the men, women, and children of America’s Gilded Age underclass. With both camera and pen, he showed the nation children sleeping under East River piers, fathers crippled by lead exposure, mothers desperate to feed their children, husbands and wives doing piecework in dark tenement rooms, and gangs of “toughs” cycling in and out of prison. Riis’s photographs and vivid prose brought home to a largely ignorant middle class the problems of overcrowding, child labor, and exploitation of working people in America’s growing cities. His work influenced housing reform, sanitation efforts, and broader Progressive Era activism, and helped establish photojournalism as a powerful tool for social change. (Summary by Tom Shoesmith)