Before publishing his pioneering book "How the Other Half Lives"a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York s tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city s populationJacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant communities that populated New York s slums, and it was this empathy that would shine through in his...
Before publishing his pioneering book "How the Other Half Lives"a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York s tenement houses, home...
On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York and delivered one of the most explosive sermons in the city's history. Municipal life, he charged, was morally corrupt. Vice was rampant. And the city's police force and its Tammany Hall politicians were"a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot." Denounced by city and police officials as a self-righteous "blatherskite," Parkhurst resolved to prove his case. The bespectacled minister descended his pulpit and in disguise visited gin joints...
On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York and ...
Animated by a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the bosses of Tammany Hall to prostitutes and counterfeiters to the do-gooders determined to change business as usual, Daniel Czitrom's New York Exposed offers an unforgettable portrait of a formative moment, when muckraking journalism and urban reform were beginning to alter the American social and political landscape.
Animated by a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the bosses of Tammany Hall to prostitutes and counterfeiters to the do-gooders determined to chan...