American journalist JACOB AUGUST RIIS (1849-1914) was the man for whom the term muckraker was coined, and the reason why is perfectly stark in this collection of true stories from the slums of late-19th-century New York City. As a police reporter and photographer for several newspapers in the 1870s, Riis became intimate with-and disgusted by-the most crime-ridden areas of the city, which were inevitably the poorest and most overpopulated by desperate immigrants. An immigrant himself-Riis had emigrated from Denmark-his work had morphed, by the 1880s, into a humanitarian cry for help for the city's most impoverished citizens, and culminated in his groundbreaking 1891 book How the Other Half Lives, a pioneering work of photojournalism that revealed the inhuman conditions of New York's tenements to an oblivious upper class. The Battle with the Slum, dating from 1902, is the sequel to that book, documenting much that had changed in a mere decade, thanks to Riis's own advocacy, and how much work still remained to be done. A replica of that first 1902 edition, complete with all the original photographs and illustrations, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of New York, of social justice, and of activist journalism.

Famous journalistic record, exposing poverty and degradation of New York slums around 1900, by major social reformer. 100 striking and influential photographs.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

Jacob Riis s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais s Pantagruel: One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country. An anatomy of New York City s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of the other half, who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.

Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of "How the Other Half Lives" reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.