How the Other Half Lives

A pioneer in the field of photojournalism, Jacob Riis (1849-1914) documented the lives of New York City’s impoverished communities and became a leading advocate for tenement reform in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Born in Denmark, Riis immigrated to the United States in 1870 at the age of 21. His European origins play an important role in How the Other Half Lives. For one, Riis’s writing reveals different kinds of prejudices than one might expect from a native-born American in the late-19th century. He did not come of age in a society that relegated its Black population to slavery or second-class citizenship, so his treatment of New York City’s Black tenants, though couched in the “racial” language of the day, reads as sympathetic. On the other hand, having been born in Northern Europe, Riis expresses attitudes typical to that part of the world. For instance, he extols the virtues of German immigrants in New York City while denigrating the Jewish community. Likewise, Riis understood better than most Americans the events and circumstances in Europe that drove millions of his fellow immigrants to seek better lives elsewhere, and this understanding is revealed in the book through periodic references to European history.