As the freedmen struggled to become part of the society,so did those immigrants who had come from many parts of the world such as Europe and Asia. The urban population in the former New England colonies, now states, were doubling and tripling as years had passed by. But with the increase in population had come the increase in poverty and several epidemics caused by poor sanitation and the lowquality lifestyle.
For those not living within the poverty stricken areas, many writers, such as Jacob Riis, author of
How the Other Half Lives
, wanted to give them a firsthand experience of how the life truly was on the other side of their lives. Riis began publishing articles in newspapers, such as the then very popular
Tribune
, to explain how the poor struggle through their lives everyday.Riis even entered into those poverty stricken areas to detail all the mini details of their lives such as where they lived, how they lived, what they ate and so on and so forth. Even though Riis’s life events led him to go into poverty for a brief period of time and experience it, he knew that others would still not understand how much these men,women and children are struggling to make a living . But as soon as a new invention, called a camera, had launched, Riis believed that taking pictures of the places in which the poor lived in, would allow the middleclass and the upperclasses to acknowledge what was really happening.
