Jacob Riis exposed urban poverty in How the Other Half Lives.

Who told the world about the city’s hidden suffering?

Let’s start with a simple, almost surprising answer: Jacob Riis. If you’re digging into AMSCO’s Period 6 landscape, you’ll run into his name as a sharp spotlight on urban poverty. He wasn’t a politician, and he wasn’t a social worker who knocked on doors with a clipboard. Riis was a Danish-born journalist who leaned into a new tool of his era—photojournalism—to tell a story too many people preferred to ignore. And the story he told in 1890, in How the Other Half Lives, still matters when we think about the era’s push for reform and the power of narrative to spark change.

A reporter with a mission, not a critic with a notebook

Riis arrived in New York City with a camera and a conscience. The city he found around 1888–1890 was a maze of crowded tenements, narrow airless rooms, and streets that smelled of coal smoke and uncollected garbage. Riis knew that statistics only go so far when you’re trying to illuminate human hardship. So he did what a journalist could do in those days: he combined eyewitness prose with stark, revealing images. The result was a book that didn’t just describe poverty; it made readers feel it.

Think of How the Other Half Lives as one of the earliest, most potent collaborations between words and pictures. Riis’s text gave context to what the photographs showed—how families slept two to a bed in rooms that were little more than a fire hazard with a window. How did people survive in spaces where bathrooms might be shared by several households? The pages aimed to jar the comfortable middle class into action, to see that poverty isn’t a distant statistic but a daily, intimate reality.

A window into life inside the tenements

Riis didn’t just snap pictures; he organized a narrative around the images to pull readers into experiences they’d otherwise ignore.

• Tenement life was vertical, crowded, and precarious. Floors creaked under the weight of families; stairwells doubled as laundry lines and drying racks.

• Children were everywhere, often at work or wandering the streets alone, with adult supervision that wasn’t always enough to keep them safe or fed.

• Sanitation was a luxury many could not afford in the harshest sense. Riis showed the consequences: cramped spaces, disease, and the constant threat of fire.

• The “other half” of the title wasn’t about a different species of humanity; it was a reminder that wealth and poverty existed in the same city, just on opposite sides of invisible lines.

Riis’s approach mattered because it fused empathy with evidence. He believed that photographs could capture something a census tally could not—the texture of daily life, the sounds and smells, the long-buried fears of parents trying to keep their kids safe in apartments that were more like cages than homes.

Why this mattered in the Progressive Era

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a blitz of social change. Industrialization had pulled people into cities, often with little safety net to catch them when the system failed. Riis’s work arrived at a moment when reformers were asking: how can law and policy begin to address problems that feel almost existential?

How the Other Half Lives didn’t single-handedly rewrite policy, but it helped shift the conversation. It fed into a broader Progressive Era impulse to reform urban life: cleaner housing, safer streets, better sanitation, and a more humane approach to workers and families. Riis’s book became a touchstone for reformers who believed that government action, guided by public awareness, could improve conditions for the most vulnerable.

It also sits alongside other vivid strands of the period. Jane Addams’s settlement houses, for instance, embodied the idea of meeting people where they lived and offering practical help—education, childcare, and a path to civic involvement. Ida B. Wells (Wells-Barnett) and Upton Sinclair operated in different spheres—investigative journalism and literary muckraking with a sharper focus on race and labor. Put together, these figures show how the era used a mix of data, storytelling, and boots-on-the-ground organizing to push for social justice.

A book that nudged policy forward—and why it still resonates

Riis’s impact wasn’t just about making readers feel a sigh of sympathy. It helped to tilt public opinion toward housing reform and more accountable urban governance. The visual rhetoric of How the Other Half Lives gave policymakers something tangible to react to—less abstract than “poverty,” more like “these specific rooms, these specific men, women, and children.” The ripple effect included calls for better street lighting, ventilation, sanitation, and the infamous, later-enacted tenement reforms.

For APUSH students, Riis is a clean thread through a complex tapestry. You can place him in the context of the era’s ethics of reform and the transition from purely charitable responses to more systematized public health and housing standards. It’s a way to see how journalism, photography, and political action intersected to reshape American cities.

How Riis compares with his contemporaries (a quick map)

If you’re weighing the answer to a question like “Who authored How the Other Half Lives?” here’s a quick sense of the field you’re navigating:

• Jacob Riis (the correct answer). A muckraking journalist who used photos to reveal urban poverty and push for reform.

• Ida B. Wells (Wells-Barnett). A fearless anti-lynching crusader and advocate for Black rights; her work is essential to understanding civil rights history, but not the author of Riis’s book.

• Jane Addams. Founder of Hull House, a key figure in settlement housing and social reform; a parallel thread in the same era’s reform mosaic.

• Upton Sinclair. A muckraking novelist best known for The Jungle, which exposed meatpacking abuses and spurred federal regulation in the early 1900s.

Each of these names helps you see the broader landscape of Progressive Era social reform, even when their focal points differ. Riis’s contribution sits at the intersection of journalism, photography, and urban policy—an intersection that still feels relevant today.

A lasting lesson for readers and builders of history

What makes Riis memorable isn’t just the history behind him; it’s the method. He treated information as something that could and should be made accessible, not hidden behind academic jargon or distant statistics. The blend of vivid writing and compelling images created a bridge between lived experience and public policy. If you’re studying for the Period 6 units, think about how other reformers of the era used similar strategies—storytelling, moral suasion, and practical programs—to influence the course of cities and state governance.

And beyond the test room, there’s a human takeaway: when people see the realities of others, they’re more likely to demand change. Riis’s work wasn’t just a historical artifact; it’s a reminder that documentation—whether through photographs, journals, or documentary reporting—can become a catalyst for policy shifts that improve everyday life.

A few reflective threads to carry with you

• The power of pairing images with narrative: Riis showed that vision plus voice can move policy more effectively than numbers alone.

• The tension between reform and realism: Riis’s work invites questions about how far government should go to regulate private life, and what society owes to families living on the edge.

• The human face behind urban policy: in history, as in any story, numbers matter, but names and faces matter even more for understanding motive and consequence.

If you’re wandering through the period’s major currents—industrial growth, urban migration, labor activism, and the early steps toward government responsibility for welfare—you’ll find Riis’s footprint in many corners. His voice is a reminder that reform often begins with someone looking closely enough to tell a story that others can’t ignore.

Bottom line

Jacob Riis is the author of How the Other Half Lives, a landmark that braided street-level reality with a clarion call for reform. His work helped illuminate the hardships hidden in the tenements and nudged readers and policymakers toward more humane housing standards. It’s a perfect example of how the era used journalism and imagery to convert concern into action. So next time you’re tracing the arc of Period 6, remember Riis: a journalist who believed that a single photograph can widen a city’s moral horizon. And beyond the specifics of one book, his approach lives on in how we study, discuss, and tell the stories of America’s urban past.