USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Jacob Riis documented the slums of New York, what he deemed the world of the “other half, ” teeming with immigrants, disease, and abuse. A police reporter and social reformer, Riis became intimately familiar with the perils of tenement living and sought to draw attention to the horrendous conditions.

Detailed explanation-2: -Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was a journalist and social reformer who publicized the crises in housing, education, and poverty at the height of European immigration to New York City in the late nineteenth century.

Detailed explanation-3: -Jacob Riis was an American newspaper reporter, social reformer, and photographer. With his book How the Other Half Lives (1890), he shocked the conscience of his readers with factual descriptions of slum conditions in New York City.

Detailed explanation-4: -This photograph, titled “Sleeping Quarters”, was taken in 1905 by Jacob Riis, a social reformer who exposed the harsh living conditions of immigrants residing in New York City during the early 1900s and inspired urban reform.

Detailed explanation-5: -Jacob Riis was born in Ribe, Denmark, the third of fifteen children of Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the local newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker. Riis was influenced both by his stern father and by the authors he read, among whom Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper were his favorites.