How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis spent years as a police reporter walking the worst blocks of Lower Manhattan, and this 1890 study turns what he saw into an argument the comfortable classes could not ignore. He describes the packed tenements of the Lower East Side ward by ward, tracing how slumlords, sweatshops, and plain indifference crowded families into airless rooms where disease and child labor were routine. The early flash photographs he took, reproduced throughout, gave middle-class readers their first real look inside these homes. The book helped launch American housing reform and shaped the Progressive movement, catching the attention of a young Theodore Roosevelt. This free PDF and EPUB edition preserves one of the founding works of documentary journalism.