I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.
PHIA (PURPOSE, HISTOCIAL CONTEXT, INTENDED AUDIENCE, AUTHOR’S POINT OF VIEW) DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
ON THE DBQ PORTION OF THE AP EXAM, IN ORDER TO EARN FULL CREDIT FOR ANALYZING DOCUMENTS, STUDENTS
MUST INCLUDE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FOR ALL OR ALL BUT ONE OF THE DOCUMENTS:
DOCUMENT
PURPOSE

ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS USING COMPLETE SENTENCES IN YOUR NOTES NOTEBOOK.

What is the author trying to achieve?

What was the outcome associated with this document?
HISTORICAL 
What kinds of outside information can you provide to promote understanding of this
CONTEXT
INTENDED
AUDIENCE
AUTHOR’S
POINT OF VIEW document?

What does the document reveal about the history involved here?

To whom is this document addressed?

Does the audience influence what the author has to say? How?

What do you know about the author?

What kind of bias do you expect he/she to have? What kind of bias is actually present?
YOU MUST ANSWER YOUR CHOICE OF TWO QUESTIONS FROM THE FOUR CATEGORIES FOR EACH OF THE
DOCUMENTS (FOR A TOTAL OF EIGHT) USING COMPLETE SENTENCES IN YOUR COMPOSITION NOTEBOOK.
The Dangers of Cities (1886) Josiah Strong
Americans accepted the city, among other reasons, because it generated prosperity. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a large urban middle class was confident in its success but worried about the future of city life. The Reverend
Josiah Strong (1847–1916), a Congregational pastor, addressed some of those concerns in Our Country, first published in
1886. Strong did not want to sit by as nature ran its course in the American city, as social Darwinists recommended. However, Strong’s call to action reflected the prejudices of his day.
Source: From Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (Baker & Taylor Co. 1891)
The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center. The fact, therefore, that it is growing much more rapidly than the whole population is full of significance . . . .
The city has become a serious menace to our civilization, because in it, excepting Mormonism, each of the dangers we have discussed is enhanced, and all are focalized. It has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant. Our fifty principal cities in 1880 contained 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities at that time contained only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign. While a little less than one-third of the population of the United States was foreign by birth or parentage, …eighty-three per cent of the population of Cleveland was foreign, sixty-three per cent of Boston, eighty per cent of New York, and ninety-one per cent of Chicago…
Because our cities are so largely foreign, Romanism finds in them its chief strength.
For the same reason the saloon, together with the intemperance and the liquor power which it represents, is multiplied in the city. East of the Mississippi there was, in 1880, one saloon to every 438 of the population; in
Boston, one to every 329; in Cleveland, one to every 192; in Chicago, one to every 179; in New York, one to every 171; in
Cincinnati, one to every 124. Of course the demoralizing and pauperizing power of the saloons and their debauching influence in politics increase with their numerical strength.
How the Other Half Lives (1890) Jacob Riis
Born in Denmark in 1849, Jacob A. Riis immigrated in 1870 to the United States. After personally struggling to make it in
his new home, New York City, he worked as a police reporter for the Tribune. Riis reported on the harsh conditions immigrants, like himself, had to face and combined reporting with photography to communicate what life was really like for those struggling to claim a place in the United States, especially those forced into New York’s squalid tenements. The
result was How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. Riis found immigrant housing an issue begging to be taken up by the progressive-minded reformers who, by the next decade, would come to influence the nation’s politics. The following is a chapter from Riis’s famous book discussing the history of the tenement house and the shocking living conditions he found there.

Source: Jacob A. Riis, “Genesis of the Tenement,” in How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New
York (1890).
It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent.
Tweed Days in St. Louis (1902) Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), born and educated in California, was a pioneer in muckraking and became famous for his searing accounts of municipal corruption. Steffens provided his readers with an informed, if sensational, look into how cities were really governed, and he epitomized the reform-minded journalism that was popular in the Progressive
Era. Steffens’s urban subjects included St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. These
pieces, which appeared in McClure’s magazine, were collected in The Shame of the Cities (1904). Here Steffens exposes the “shame” of St. Louis, which he likens to that of New York City. “Tweed,” which appears in the title, refers to New
York’s Tweed Ring, the notoriously corrupt political machine that was led by William Tweed and controlled the city.
Source: Excerpt from Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904), 29–36.
From the Assembly, bribery spread into other departments. Men empowered to issue peddlers’ licenses and permits to citizens who wished to erect awnings or use a portion of the sidewalk for storage purposes charged an amount in excess of the prices stipulated by law, and pocketed the difference. The city’s money was loaned at interest, and the interest was converted into private bank accounts. City carriages were used by the wives and children of city officials. Supplies for public institutions found their way to private tables; one itemized account for food furnished the poorhouse included California jellies, imported cheeses, and French wines! A member of the Assembly caused the incorporation of a grocery company, with his sons and daughters the ostensible stockholders, and succeeded in having his bid for city supplies accepted although the figures were in excess of his competitors’. In return for the favor thus shown, he indorsed a measure to award the contract for city printing to another member, and these two voted aye on a bill granting to a third the exclusive right to furnish city dispensaries with drugs.
The Church and the Social Movement (1907) Walter Rauschenbusch
While serving as the pastor of a Baptist church in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, Walter Rauschenbusch learned firsthand that the poor could not be satisfied merely by exhortations to faith. Rauschenbusch set out to apply the teachings of the
Gospels to contemporary urban life. His writings on the Social Gospel, like the following selection from Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), were those of a Christian socialist.
Source: Excerpt from Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907)
Thus the Church has a tremendous stake in the social crisis. It may try to maintain an attitude of neutrality, but neither side will permit it. If it is quiescent, it thereby throws its influence on the side of things as they are,and the class which aspires to a fitter place in the organization of society will feel the great spiritual force of the Church as a dead weight against it. If it loses the loyalty and trust of the working class, it loses the very class in which it originated, to which its founders belonged, and which has lifted it to power. If it becomes a religion of the upper classes, it condemns itself to a slow and comfortable death. Protestantism from the outset entered into an intimate alliance with the intelligence and wealth of the city population. As the cities grew in importance since the Reformation, as commerce overshadowed agriculture, and as the business class crowded the feudal aristocracy out of its leading position since the
French Revolution, Protestantism throve with the class which had espoused it. It lifted its class, and its class lifted it.
I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.