Books can tell us a lot about history and the times in which they were published. If we analyze books, which are primary source documents, we can learn about how the author perceived the times he or she was living in, and get a glimpse of what thing were like then. Now I am going to look at The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and explain to you what we can learn from it upon careful examination.
First, the book was published in 1906, during what is today known as the Gilded Age of America. The Gilded Age was a time where the prospect of becoming rich and prosperous was drawing in many immigrants, and sets the scene for Sinclair’s book. The main characters from The Jungle are immigrants who had come to America to prosper, but that is not to be their fate. In fact, the purpose of this writing was to bring to life the ugly, harsh reality that many of the immigrants had to go through, to paint a clear image of all that was wrong for those who may not be aware. He was trying to evoke change, to stir things up and bring to the surface the buried core of the pleasing exterior.…show more content… Well, upon reading just two chapters—chapters 12 and 13—the poor, unfair working conditions are made strikingly obvious. Aside from just that point, which may be one of the obvious themes of the book, we can also gather that there were no food safety laws, and that you could never be sure what was in your food. “Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning--which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export,” is an excerpt from chapter thirteen which very blatantly states that the sausage may have been bad. This makes it clear to us that every time you ate was a gamble during this time in history, whether the food would be bad or not was a mystery. Not only was the quality of food a mystery, but so was the fact of actually having
