"Slum: A dirty back street of a city, especially such a street inhabited by a squalid and criminal population; a low and dangerous neighborhood." --Century Dictionary of the English Language, 1891

This Week:

This week we examine the changing ways in which Chicagoans made connections between the city's fabric and the behavior of its residents. Between the 1880s and World War I reformers and scholarly investigators in a number of large cities focused new attention on poor housing as a factor in poverty, and on the arrival of many poor people as a factor in creating slum neighborhoods. New York journalist and reformer Jacob Riis was the most influential early voice in this new movement of concern, but Chicago quickly became a hotbed of investigation and agitation as well. Those writing about Chicago's poorest neighborhoods played a major role in shaping the infant academic discipline of sociology.

Readings:

• Selections from Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (see Electronic Resources, below)
• In course packet:
  William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894). Contents, Preface, Chapters 1, 5, 6, pp. 9-32, 99-133.
  Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, "Chicago's Housing Problem: Families in Furnished Rooms," American Journal of Sociology, 16 (November, 1910), pp. 289-308.
  Ernest Burgess, "The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project," in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie eds., The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), pp. 47-62.
  
• Electronic Resources:
  Week 4 Notebook
  Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), Introduction, Chapters 1-4, 11.
  This is linked to an excellent hypertext edition prepared by David Phillips

Questions to consider:

• How do these four works compare in terms of basic assumptions, goals, emphases, methods, and tone? More particularly, how does each of them explain the relationship between the slum environment and the characteristics of slum residents?
• How would you describe the evolution of ideas over the thirty-five-year period between the first and last of these works?

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Last Updated: 01/23/99