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Jacob Riis

            
             "I loved him from the day I saw him; nor ever in all the years that passed has he failed of the promise made then. No one ever helped as he did. For two years we were brothers on Mulberry Street. (Theodore Roosevelt www.richmondhillhistory.org) Jacob Riis was a helpful kind of guy and was always there when you needed him. He was also a great man in the history of the U.S.
             In the year 1849 a great man was born who had a great impact on the United States of America. His name was Jacob Riis. He was born in Ribe, Denmark in 1849. Jacob Riis was the 3rd of 13 children in his family. .
             As a young child going into his teens he was noticed for many things he did. When he was around 9 or 10 years old he would give his pocket money to the residents of his hometown. He reported about the slums in the city where immigrants stayed and it was not clean and the streets were full of garbage. Therefore in his articles Riis tried to tell everything and allow his audiences to see through his stories and pictures the fact that poverty is present everywhere in the cities.
             As a young adult he immigrated to America in 1870. He got on a to the U.S. and later settled in Iowa and became a police reporter and then wrote a book called "How The Other Half Lives". Eventually Jacob Riis was the photographer and on the NY board about commissions. He was a Danish American journalist and a social reformer. To get his story of the slums in the papers he got a job at The New York Tribune. .
             In older adult years Riis began to use his photo's to backup his arguments. He was a journalist a lecturer and a photographer for the board of commission in 1891-1892. His pictures of the Brooklyn tenements brought about wide spread horror because it reported about how awful the cities were and how poor and run down the were. He also went to inspect the tenements in the city himself instead of having people go inspect them.


Essays Related to Jacob Riis

1. How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

... speak louder than words; I say photographs speak louder as well. In the book "How the Other Half Lives," by Jacob Riis, the author writes about the living conditions of the tenement houses. Housed in these apartments were mostly poor immigrants trying to survive. Riis, a photographer, captured the unhealthy, unclean and horrible conditions not only through his words but mostly through his pictures. His ... paved the way for reform and allowed others to see what the slums of New York City were like. The photojournalism presented by Riis had a major impact on the message he was trying to ...

  • Word Count: 912
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

2. Riis

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 ... and overcrowded in the tenements that New York's East side (where the tenements were located) had the highest population density in the world! Jacob Riis recognized that the ever-increasing lower class was a major problem and would only get worse if the tenement situation was not remedied. The tenant ... from Denmark, part of the wave of...

  • Word Count: 1638
  • Approx Pages: 7
  • Grade Level: High School

3. Jacob Riis and Social Reform

The chapter "The Down Town Back-Alleys" in Jacob Riis' novel "How the Other Half Lives" focuses on the plight of the poor on the lower east side of Manhattan. The novel focuses on what Riis calls the "other half," indicating the division between the poor people ... housing. He details the gruesome day-to-day lives of the poor, and he stresses how dissimilar their lives are compared to his audience. Riis describes social divisions amongst people, and at times uses offensive writing against certain groups in order to further his thesis. His writing could be construed ... the Brooklyn Bridge." Th...

  • Word Count: 1082
  • Approx Pages: 4
  • Grade Level: High School

4. An analysis of Joacob Riis" Ho

Jacob Riis" book, How the Other Half Lives, is an account on the unfortunate and the impoverished in New York City. Riis tried to write this book with objectivity but given his background and personal connection to the apartment tenants it was hard to keep that objectivity throughout his book. The references ... feels that if they (the Italians or any of the minority groups) come to the United States they should know enough English to communicate or do not come at all. Riis refers to all the immigration groups in a negative way. He criticizes the intelligence levels of the Italians, how unc...

  • Word Count: 618
  • Approx Pages: 2

5. How the Other Half Lives

... social services were almost non-existent in the slums. In "How The Other Half Lives", Jacob Riis tried to expose and clarify the living conditions of New York's poor to its wealthy. "The other half" that Riis refers to is the city's poor population whose lifestyle was largely unknown to New York's Prestigious ... also allocates specific chapters for the analysis of each major ethnic group individually, and the manner in which they confront tenement living. In his book Jacob A. Riis also briefly describe his feelings towards the new wave of immigrants coming to America in the late 1890's....

  • Word Count: 1875
  • Approx Pages: 8
  • Grade Level: High School

6. The Children & Orphanage

... America, people from all over the world have been coming topromised land.? Home of the brave, land of the free! Jacob Riis evocative black and white photographs, taken more than a century ago, propel us both backward and forward through history. Jacob August Riis, a New York City police reporter, found his world transformed with the advent offlashlight powder.? This compelling discovery, a very ... primitive flash photography, allowed Riis the opportunity to photograph the inside world of the Manhattan slums. Jacob Riis, the author of the bestseller How the Other Half Lives, hated pover...

  • Word Count: 555
  • Approx Pages: 2
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: High School

7. Progressives And The Industrial Movement

... our control, but under the control of the great force of the earth itself (natural). The first progressive is Jacob Riis. Jacob Riis believed that the industrial movement brought forth terrible, poor tenement living. Riis argued that as business increased and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the ... they could divide the house into different sections and made families live within four walls, they could make a profit. This became of tenement living. Riis's problem with tenement living was that a lot of people would die from disease due to very unsanitar...

  • Word Count: 1267
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Has Bibliography

8. Progressives

... our control, but under the control of the great force of the earth itself (natural). The first progressive is Jacob Riis. Jacob Riis believed that the industrial movement brought forth terrible, poor tenement living. Riis argued that as business increased and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the ... they could divide the house into different sections and made families live within four walls, they could make a profit. This became of tenement living. Riis's problem with tenement living was that a lot of people would die from disease due to very unsanitar...

  • Word Count: 831
  • Approx Pages: 3

9. The life of the Jewish Immigrant

... largely by Russian Jews." Most other documents I come across seem to agree with this expect for one. Jacob A. Riis says "Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and Jewtown is no exception." Mr. Riis does not quite a specific data but makes multiple statements about the large problem of disease in "Jewtown ... allowed for many Jewish business men to prosper and do fairly well over time. The Jewish immigrant's peers all had varying views of them. Jacob Riis interested me the most in that his views differed greatly from the other writers. He also made various reference...

  • Word Count: 1938
  • Approx Pages: 8
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: High School

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