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by Jacob A. Riis (Author)
How the Other Half Lives is Jacob A. Riis's landmark account of poverty, tenement housing, immigration, labour, childhood, and urban reform in late nineteenth-century New York. Drawing on his work as a journalist and pioneering documentary photographer, Riis exposed the crowded and often dangerous conditions of Manhattan's tenements, bringing middle-class readers face to face with the lives of workers, immigrants, children, lodgers, and families crowded into the city's poorest districts.
First published in 1890, the book became one of the defining works of American social reform and remains important in the history of journalism, photography, urban studies, poverty studies, and Progressive Era reform. Riis's text reflects the assumptions and language of his period, including attitudes toward race, ethnicity, class, immigration, and reform that modern readers may find troubling, but its historical force remains unmistakable. For readers of American history, social criticism, documentary photography, urban sociology, and reform literature, How the Other Half Lives is a foundational document of the modern city and the public conscience it helped awaken.
