Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Scribner’s, November 1890. Harvard University Press: “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.”
Continue reading...The Treasures of the Yosemite
John Muir, The Treasures of the Yosemite. Century, August 1890. From Tony Perrottet, John Muir’s Yosemite, Smithsonian, July 2008: “In 1889, in his early 50s, Muir camped with Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of Century magazine, in Tuolumne Meadows, where he had worked as a shepherd in 1869. Together they devised a plan to create a 1,200-square-mile Yosemite National Park, a proposal Congress passed the following year. In 1903, the 65-year-old Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt were able to give Secret Service agents the slip and disappear for three days, camping in the wild. It was during this excursion, historians believe, that Muir persuaded the president to expand the national park system and to combine, under federal authority, both Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove, which had remained under California jurisdiction as authorized by Lincoln decades before. Unification of the park came in 1906.”
Continue reading...Ten Days in a Mad-House
Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House. Book version of a two-part series published in the New York World on 9 October and 16 October 1887. From Time magazine, 12 April 2009: “It was rare for a woman to hold a job in the 19th century. It was even rarer for one to work at as a newspaper reporter — and rarer still to have that paper send her undercover, to expose the brutality and neglect within a New York mental institution. But in 1887, that’s exactly what Nellie Bly did. Bly had herself involuntarily committed to the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for ten days. (She checked into a women’s boarding facility, acted erratically, and then allowed the all-too-eager boarding house employees to call the loony bin). After gaining entrance to the facility, the 23-year-old reverted back to a normal, sane pattern of behavior and tried to get them to release her. ‘Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be,’ she wrote in her series of articles for the New York World. Bly recounted stories of spoiled food, nurses who kept patients awake all night, ice cold baths, beatings and forced feedings. The articles aroused public outcry, [and] brought on much needed political reform….”
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