Flowers and Thugs: The Slum Photos of Jacob Riis

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Kristine Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Jacob Riis

Walter Rauschenbusch and the Brotherhood of the Kingdom

1938 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Howard Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Storm And Stress ◽  
The Social ◽  
Walter Rauschenbusch ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
Manchester School ◽  
The Church

The Brotherhood of the Kingdom was organized in December, 1892, by a small group of converts to the ideal of the kingdom of God on earth who, not unmindful of the examples of St. Francis and of the Society of Jesus, planned to reestablish the idea of the kingdom “in the thought of the church and to assist in its practical realization in the world.” The year 1892 had witnessed a rising crescendo of social turbulence and political unrest throughout America. In the midwest the populist revolt was growing, while industrial warfare had broken out in the violent Homestead strike at the Carnegie steel plants. Jacob Riis had opened wide the festering tenements of the great cities in his revelation of How the Other Half Lives, while in intellectual circles the younger economists were rebelling against the tenets of the Manchester school. William Jennings Bryan's campaign for free silver was only four years away, and the Spanish–American War but six years in the future. Into such an atmosphere of storm and stress was born the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, dedicated to the realization of a spiritual ideal in the social order.

scholarly journals PROYECTO RIIS: UN HAPPENING PARA LA VIDA SOCIAL

2021 ◽  
pp. 34-49
Author(s):  
Juan José Tuset Davó
Keyword(s):  
Jacob Riis

Cuando el espacio público se vacía de usos y se le priva a la gente que lo haga suyo, el espacio muere. Esta situación mueve a la arquitectura a iniciar su revitalización. La plaza-parque Jacob Riis (1966) de Nueva York, obra del arquitecto del paisaje M. Paul Friedberg, nos alecciona en este sentido. Su proyecto arquitectónico tiene la condición de laboratorio de la forma urbana para redefinir la arquitectura del espacio común. El proyecto Riis muestra una manera diferente de transformar los espacios en desuso en áreas marginales residenciales. En concreto, el parque de juegos infantil es la expresión de una forma provisional de espacio público condensador de vida social. Visto desde el presente, rompió con los modelos precedentes, comenzó nuevos caminos disciplinares en la arquitectura del paisaje, codificó conocimientos previos y vaticinó su propio desarrollo a través de las variaciones de su forma. El proyecto Riis acumula arquitecturas específicas en un campo expandido, es un entorno de juego total, un happening en el que la vida social vuelve a recuperar el espacio del que había sido expulsada. El proyecto Riis nos muestra la capacidad de la arquitectura para transformar el espacio común y determinar el valor del proyecto arquitectónico como vehículo para la reforma social.

Jacob Riis Houses

2016 ◽  
pp. 128-131
Author(s):  
Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Keyword(s):  
Jacob Riis

American Realism and Photography

2019 ◽  
pp. 552-565
Author(s):  
Astrid Böger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between realist literature and photography since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both media responded to the challenges of modernity by contriving new means of representing reality. Whereas photography became the standard for objective reproduction following the pictorial turn, realist authors including Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar honed literature’s capacity to focus on inner realities, such as subjective experience and memory, impossible to capture in a photograph. Jacob Riis, in turn, adopted the aesthetic of the urban picturesque for How the Other Half Lives, a photo-textual record of immigrant life in New York serving as a precursor for the documentary books of the Great Depression, which advocated national relief programs to alleviate the distress of rural Americans. Countering such facile approaches to complex realities, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally, presents a fundamental critique of representation itself.

Jacob Riis Revisited: Poverty and the Slum in Another Era.

1970 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 370
Author(s):  
James A. Jones ◽  
Francesco Cordasco
Keyword(s):  
Jacob Riis

Pictures vs. Words? Public History, Tolerance, and the Challenge of Jacob Riis

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward T. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Public History ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
Entire Career

Through his pioneering use of photography and muckraking prose (most especially in How the Other Half Lives, 1890), Jacob Riis earned fame as a humanitarian in the classic Progressive Era mold. Yet in recent years some revisionist scholars have denounced Riis as an unreconstructed racist who merely posed as a benevolent reformer. Does this rethinking of Riis and the character of his work mean that public historians who have come to revere his photographs should shun them when producing public history related to themes of ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, and tolerance? The author argues against this conclusion for two reasons. First, a careful analysis of Riis's entire career and body of written work reveals a man who, despite his lapses into the language of racist stereotypes, was fundamentally tolerant to a degree that far surpassed his contemporaries. Second, the bold use of Riis's words and photos provides the public historian with an extraordinary opportunity to delve into the complex questions of assimilation and Americanization, labor exploitation, cultural diversity, social control, and middle-class fear that lie at the heart of the American immigration narrative.

How to Seduce a Working Girl: Vaudevillian Entertainment in American Working–Class Fiction 1890–1925

Prospects ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 377-391
Author(s):  
Lisa DuRose
Keyword(s):  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Stephen Crane ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
Sister Carrie ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
The City

“The city,” Theodore Dreiser explains at the beginning of Sister Carrie, “has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are larger forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the pervasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye” (1). Dreiser's description here echoes many early 20th-century writers' anxieties about the rise of the modern city — from social reformers like Jane Addams and Jacob Riis to journalists and novelists as varied as Stephen Crane and Jean Toomer. But it is Dreiser's depiction of the city as a seducer, as an irresistible wooer, which finally arrives at the heart of the controversy. In the age that saw an increase in the most socially diverse wage seekers — newly arrived immigrants, Southern blacks who migrated North, and single, young women from the country — the city promises, only in the heat of passion, economic and social possibilities, a chance to live out the full contract of American democracy. And the city finds no better stage for its wooing of these new generations of Americans than that of the vaudeville theater.

JACOB RIIS: CITIZENSHIP AND ART

1991 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-566
Author(s):  
James Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Jacob Riis
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