Please grab your English binder, and open up to
your “Do Now” section of your binder.
Do Now

Respond to the following question in one
paragraph or more. You have ten
minutes:
 What is a social issue that you are
concerned about and why?
Line up Chit Chat
Tell the person across from you what
your wrote
 The person with the lightest color hair
should share first.

The Progressive Era
1890 – 1920
 American women earn the right to vote
in 1918
 Jazz music becomes very popular
 Filmmaking becomes very popular
 Accessibility to tobacco and alcohol
 The point is . . . Social change was
happening fast!

19th Century American Literature






Muckraking and Reform
Journalistic Phenomenon
The “literature of exposure”
Magazines are the primary medium, followed
by newspapers
Focus on failures of government and
corporations
Primary targets of muckrakers:
 Child labor, exploitation of minorities by
government and corporations, meat processing
industry
Jacob Riis 1849-1949





Born in Ribe, Denmark in 1849
Immigrated to New York in 1870 at 21 years old.
Initially, he was unable to find work, so he lived
in police lodging houses, begging for food.
After three years of doing odd jobs, he landed a
job as a police reporter with the New York
Evening Sun. He worked in the poorest, most
crime-ridden areas of the city. These were
generally neighborhoods where immigrants lived
in deplorable tenement houses.
How the Other Half Lives (1890) inspired then
police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to
close the police lodging houses as the
conditions were so poor.
How the Other Half Lives
In the 1890s, many people in the middle
and upper class society were unaware
of the dangerous conditions in the slums
among poor immigrants.
 He blamed the apathy of the middle and
upper classes for the conditions of the
New York slums, and assumed that as
people were made more aware of these
conditions they would be motivated to
help eradicate them.

Review

Talk to your shoulder partner about the
following:
 What is visual literacy?
Photograph Titles

On a piece of paper, work with your
shoulder partner to come up with a title
for each of Riis’s photographs.