How The Other Half Lives Summary

In Lives in Limbo, Gonzales mentions the word transition in the first chapter as well as the three important stages that are involved in each transition, which are the preliminary, liminal, and post-liminal stages. By transition, he means the conversion between childhood to adolescence, and adolescence to adulthood. In this book, he focuses on the transitions of undocumented youth and how having no legal immigration status can affect their daily lives. He states that “migrants without any form of legal immigration status remain stuck in the second liminal stage” because some of his respondents can’t proceed to adulthood like their fellow Americans. They cannot achieve this transition because of their inabilities to receive employment, housing or even a driver’s license due to their legal status.

Riis’s rhetoric is simplistic to understand. He writes his observations and feelings as fact. “The Color Line in New York” provides a contrast between colored and European minorities: the colored referring to the African-Americans while the white referred to the Irish and Italian generally. Colored tenants in New York were crammed into small spaces together and charged more rent compared to their white counterparts. The idea was that once a “negro” occupied the space, it loses its value. Riis’s rhetoric depicts the unfairness that African-Americans faced at the greedy hands of white landlords in his story of Anna. The landlord was willing to take the money from Riis as an excuse for an unpaid rent that Riis was quick to disbelieve. Riis is fair in his explanation that the progress which African-Americans have made is great considering that they were slaves twenty-five years ago and prejudice still exists. He is also fair in demonstrating that African-Americans are orderly as to European minorities, which allows for the discrimination over the rent amount to be observable.

How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future "muckraking" journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle classes. This work inspired many reforms of working-class housing, both immediately after publication as well as making a lasting impact in today's society. Vivid imagery and complex syntax establish a sympathetic tone which Riis uses to expose poverty to the general public and calls upon them to take action and make a difference.

Eradication is the complete destruction of something. ''How the Other Half Lives'' shows the life of immigrants. One example from the pictures of Jacob Riis took was called "Five Cents Lodging," it shows the poor immigrants are in dirty little tenement that were rented out for five cents. The picture shows the struggle of immigrants when they came to America. The immigrants were looking for a better life in American, but instead got stuck in poverty, and would often die of diseases. In addition, Jacob Riis wrote over 101 pages about Five Points. Jacob Riis impacted Five Points by showing the world how the poor immigrants lived. One example from " How the Other Half lives" states,"The twenty-five cent lodging- house keeps up the pretense of a bedroom,through the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allows the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul. At the ten-cent level the locker for the sleeper's clothes disappears. There is no longer need of it. The tramp limit is reached, and there is nothing to lock up save, on general principles, the lodger. Usually the ten and seven-cent lodgings are different grades of the same abomination. Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket( How the Other Half Lives). In this quote from Jacob Riis's he talks about the houses and how even the most expensive houses are garbage. He writes about the beds the people sleep on and how the homes are "abominations," meaning they are disgusting and not worth living in even if they are rented for five cents. Therefore, Jacob Riis showed the world how poor immigrants lived, and this eventually led to the destruction of Five

Riis covers many aspects of the poverty that has stricken the tenement lodgers but when talking about one end of the spectrum (poor) you also need to discuss the other (rich). With out telling people how the other half of the other half lives he’s leaving out a crucial part of how people live in New York. By avoiding, that topic he’s giving the illusion that all people in New York live in such cramped housing as tenements. When in reality New York was and is presently not composed of strictly tenement housing. There was a ‘rich’ part of town where the thought of not having any money was never even contemplated. In addition, where the industrial revolution only touched higher societies on positive outcomes such as economics the industrial revolution only made it harder for the immigrants to get ahead. By this, meaning, that they worked harder, got paid little to nothing, and still had to compensate for the short comings that where being pressed against them because they were in fact immigrants.

Riis shows how society had long turned a blind eye to this less reality. As he informs the readers in How the other Half Lives, the upper classes had long harbored fear from the poor. This fact proved very useful for Riis as it gave him room to use fear-evoking arguments to convince the higher class that the social reform is essential for everyone’s good. Riis argued that the ever- growing poverty in America posed a high risk not only for immigrants living in the slums. He employed statistical data correlating the ever-growing poverty with the increase the crime rate as well as the rapid expansion of tenement, to warn the middle and high class that poverty is a serious risk for them too. Hi goes on to argue that the cholera epidemic showed Americans how devastating such widespread illness could be, especially in urban areas. He warned the middle and high class that the tenements were the hotbeds for such epidemics and reminded them that such deceases never discriminate but bring death to the rich and poor alike.

In “Part One: The Negro and the City,” Osofsky describes the early Black neighborhoods of New York City, in the lower parts of Manhattan: from Five Points, San Juan Hill, and the Tenderloin. He describes the state of

Roberts organizes his book based on certain themes, such as culture and day-to-day life, paying special attention to the pre- and post-War periods so as to emphasize the evolution of the slum throughout the period of time covered. He divides it into chapters that cover specific aspects of society and day-to-day life in order to accentuate certain points. His writing style is a unique and well-chosen blend of personal reminiscences and historical research. Much of his writing, including his own experiences, is presented in a very matter-of-fact way. The impact this style has on the reader is great because he is able to state such horrors so bluntly, as only someone who was truly there can. Occasionally, however, his emotions break through, as is evident in his explanation of his parents' separation and subsequent death on page 238. Lastly, the work is scholarly and concise, as Roberts chooses to get straight to the point and elaborate on it rather than saying the same thing in many different ways.

Many people don’t realize it, but without Jacob Riis, our city would still be the way as I previously described. New York would be known, not for it’s beautiful city lights, busy streets, and other attractions but for the nasty environment that envelops it. Thankfully, this is not the case and change in our society has occurred. Jacob Riis is a photographer, news reporter, and author. By using his skills, Riis crafted books and newspaper articles, completed with pictures to inform the public about the terrible conditions immigrants and city dwellers suffered in.

Riis wrote about different ethnic groups when he was living in New York. He wrote about greedy Jews, drunken Irish, and sloppy Italians. Riis also wrote with Christian morality. He blamed the faults of the above mentioned people on the poor living conditions that they were in. Like any other photographer or author, Riis’s motive must be figured out. It was already clear that he wanted change for the slums but in his pictures, the authors of the passage describe some pictures having Riis’s Christian morality in play. Riis highlights the needs for stable, wholesome families. The picture of page 191 is an example of a non-wholesome family. The home is supposed to be a resting place but factory work made its way into the home, making the entire family work. Photos like these were examples of Riis’s motives behind his photos. The photo on page 193 called “Room in a tenement flat” showed a family portrait. The room that they were in was very crammed and Riis again shows a family in poor living conditions. Riis also photographed many children, like the ones in “street arabs” on page 195. The photo is heart wrenching and captivates any viewer because of the pitiful place they had to sleep in.

Hughes uses powerful imagery as he describes the most ostracized groups in American society from which this voice derives: the poor white man “fooled and pushed apart”, the black man “bearing slavery’s scars”, the red man “driven from his land”, and the immigrant “clutching” onto hope. He uses stirring metaphors, “slavery’s scars”, to relay the image of suffering experienced by these forgotten

“Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body”(Coates 5). The phrase “lose my body” is reiterated numerous times in Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The topic/theme of this piece of literature may be discernable as innocence as Ta-Nehisi profusely speaks of how his upbringing changed and affected his perspective on life. Coates uses a multitude of examples to portray this from how he witnessed another boy almost being shot at a young age to him learning and understanding the laws and “culture of the streets”(Coates 24) as who and even more who not to mess with(Coates 23). Coates effectively uses these examples as perfect representations of living in an American ghetto as well as how since birth blacks do not “own” their body and are susceptible to lose it.

One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

Jacob Riis, an immigrant from Denmark and the author and photographer of How the Other Half Lives, is no exception to this reality. Riis, in his book, tries to convince reformers to do something about the poor, urban slums of which many immigrants lived. He has many images depicting the conditions in these slums, however none of them completely tell the whole story. For example, as a Christian, Riis incorporates his moral beliefs into his pictures of the slums. Riis believed that stable families was a factor that could lead to making the slum conditions more bearable. The family and home were supposed to be a haven from the harsh work world. He photographed a family in their home, as seen on page 217, however, their home looks the opposite of a haven from the work world. Every member of the family is stretching tobacco leaves as if the work world has nudged its way into their home. Riis’ typical audience and intended audience would find this shocking because Protestants had the same belief Riis did on work coming into the home. By taking this picture, Riis wants the viewer to think that every household (if one had a residence) in the slums was like this. His purpose, to get reformers to reform the urban slum situation, prevents the viewer from knowing the truth that not

The book How the Other Half lives, is one of those books that definitely affects you as soon as you read it. Jacob Riis the author of the book, wrote it exactly for the purpose, to affect people and get them to realize how bad the conditions were back then in New York City. He goes into full depth, of what the living conditions were like, who lived in them, and how they were affected by them. Mostly how each ethnic group lived in the tenements, and what the city did to improve them.