Jacob A. Riis

A Jewish State

By Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl proposes a solution to the 'Jewish Question' and to anti-Semitism: a separate and independent ...

My Father's Girl

By Jane Addams

Jane Addams, whose Hull-House became a symbol of progressive reform, here remembers her father who helped ...

Paris Goes to War

By Edith Wharton

As the World War engulfs Europe in August 1914, Edith Wharton reports from Paris on the ...

Emancipation

By Lord Charwood

Lord Charnwood recounts the development and importance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a signal event in American ...

Darwin Changes His Mind

By Charles Darwin

Here is Darwin’s account of his visit to the Galapagos Islands with its myriad species, which ...

A Grand Way to Chronicle a War

By Ronald Weber

A fascinating glimpse of World War II journalism behind the front lines at Paris’s Hotel Scribe, ...

The Genius and the Jerk

By Walter Vatter

Walter Vatter explores the early years of Steve Jobs--was he a genius, or simply an expert ...

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall

By William L. Riordon

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” said George Washington Plunkitt in this charming manual ...

Dawning of the Counter-culture: The 1960s

A lively survey of the eccentric politics and culture of ...

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Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914), himself an immigrant, came to the United States from Denmark at age twenty-one. Arriving in New York, he worked on farms and at odd jobs before taking a job as a journalist, first as a trainee with the New York News Association and eventually as a police reporter with the New York Tribune, working the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. His reporting, enhanced by his own pioneering photographs, made a difference in the lives of the immigrants by influencing the reform of the slums.

Read 'Jewtown' in the New Land by Jacob A. Riis

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Jacob A. Riis