Jacob Riis was a Danish-American journalist with a reformist bent from the turn of the century.  For those not a personal fan of Riis, the term is “muckraker.”  He was the son of a hard-working Danish newspaper-editor who had fourteen other children to worry about.  At 12 he donated all of his Christmas money to a poorer family and at 21 he steamed to America alone to work as a carpenter.  His only friend was a stray dog which was subsequently beat to death before his eyes by a police officer.  He struggled to get by in police-run poor-houses for four years until he landed a job as a police reporter.  He left his first newspaper for another and finally was successful enough to begin “paying back” by exposing the degradation and horrors of poor immigrant America and improving their lot.  His work culminated in a series of essays both written and photographic, culminating in How The Other Half Lives.  Riis was among the first photographers to use “flash powder” to enable photography even in dark poorly-lit environs, making him something of a pioneer of the trade.  His reforming crusade won him the friendship of Roosevelt and closed down the horrendous police-run poor-houses that had made his life so miserable when he first arrived.  His work can found at any of the following links:

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/photos/images/riis4.gif

http://www.atschool.org/materials/primary/images/riis1.jpg

http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/kroggenkamp/riis3.jpg

http://www.sat.lib.tx.us/JETA/images/riis.jpg

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vox-pop/images/gny3.jpg

 

How The Other Half Lives can be found online at  http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html

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