How the Other Half Lives

Studies among the Tenements of New York

Jacob A. Riis, Sam Bass Warner Jr., Sam Bass Warner

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780674049321
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674056824
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

Jacob Riis's pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais's Pantagruel: "One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country." An anatomy of New York City's slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of "the other half," who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.

Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of How the Other Half Lives reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis's original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Coyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction by Alan Trachtenberg
• Note on the Text
• Chronology of Jacob A. Riis’s Life
• How the other half lives
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter I. Genesis of the Tenement
• Chapter II. The Awakening
• Chapter III. The Mixed Crowd
• Chapter IV. The Downtown Back Alleys
• Chapter V. The Italian in New York
• Chapter VI. The Bend
• Chapter VII. A Raid on the Stale-Beer Dives
• Chapter VIII. The Cheap Lodging Houses
• Chapter IX. Chinatown
• Chapter X. Jewtown
• Chapter XI. The Sweaters of Jewtown
• Chapter XII. The Bohemians—Tenement House Cigarmaking
• Chapter XIII. The Color Line in New York
• Chapter XIV. The Common Herd
• Chapter XV. The Problem of the Children
• Chapter XVI. Waifs of the City’s Slums
• Chapter XVII. The Street Arab
• Chapter XVIII. The Reign of Rum
• Chapter XIX. The Harvest of Tares
• Chapter XX. The Working Girls of New York
• Chapter XXI. Pauperism in the Tenements
• Chapter XXII. The Wrecks and the Waste
• Chapter XXIII. The Man with the Knife
• Chapter XXIV. What Has Been Done
• Chapter XXV. How the Case Stands
• Appendix: Statistics Bearing on the Tenement Problem
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index