Jacob Riis 'How The Other Half Lives'

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Many people view social justice as a common thing in life. We all have our different opinions about it as well. Some feel like it is very good here in America while others tend to not agree with that statement. Jacob Riis wrote a book about How the Other Half Lives, and it was basically a look into the lives of the poor people and how they fight for survival and what our government is doing to help those people. Social justice is for all the people to feel safe and secure in the community as well as their homes and if they don’t have that then what do we as a whole have?

Jacob Riis exposed the evil of poverty in New York City and its destructive effects on society through his writings and photographs. His exposé altered public opinion on this social issue, encouraged the enactment of political reforms, and impacted the way journalists and muckrakers convey the poor’s plight to their communities. Riis’s life …show more content…

“How the Other Half Lives follows a general outline for the charity writings of the nineteenth century: a section on crime, the Protestant virtues and vices intemperance, idleness, disorder, uncleanliness, miserable conditions of living, disease, the loss of modesty especially in women, the dissolution of the family, the institutions that would help in their uplift, as well as future sources of reform.” The difference was the introduction of photography to prove the squalid conditions, and increase sympathy for the individuals living in these slums. Riis finally convinced the average reader of newspapers that the poor were not so by choice; that the dangerous and unhygienic conditions in which they lived were imposed by society, rather than the result of loose moral standards; that the slums were something that needed to be fixed rather than gaped at or

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