Jacob Riis Jane Addams Essay on Progressive Era free essay sample

At the turn of the twentieth century the press received a great amount of credit for the success of the Progressive movement. Notable muckrakers Jane Addams and Jacob Riis showed determination towards there being a change; each made sure to use their abilities to aid in not only a social way, but ask economically and politically, even to this day what theyve done has made a massive impact. A native of Denmark, Jacob Riis moved to the US in 1870 to pursue work. Riis worked as a police reporter, but eventually became a social reformer. He fought to eliminate the devastating slum-like conditions that were present in New York Citys Lower East Side. With the use of his book â€Å"How the Other Half Lives†, Riis was able to open many of the wealthy residences eyes to how immigrants and the less fortunate lives during that era. Riis himself endured similar conditions when he first made the transition to the states; he struggled with being jobless, hungry and homeless, many nights he copes with thoughts of suicide. We will write a custom essay sample on Jacob Riis Jane Addams Essay on Progressive Era or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Three years later he acquired a job as a journalist working for the New York association. How the Other Half Lives† targeted the minds of wealthy citizens as a way to get them to open their eyes to what others just like them were forced to live through. Jacob Riis pointed out that there were single family dwellings that shared side walls with other houses, they were called tenements and were overcrowded and unsanitary. Riis was able to project a very concerned tone and empathize with the people that suffered with poverty, because he too himself knows what it feels like to experience such an battle. Through the pictures in his book, America was able to see what little the government did to help financially unstable people. Riis along with fellow muckrakers Upton Sinclair with his novel â€Å"The Jungle† which shed light on disgusting and filthy conditions surrounding the production of food products, and Jane Addams who created the Hull Houses as a way to provide shelter and better living conditions for Americans. Overall Riis was able to accomplish exactly what he wanted, he was capable of successfully accomplishing what he set out to, with the recognition â€Å"How the Other Half Lives† received, people from the outside looking in changed their mindsets and actually improve the living conditions for the poor, which at that time lessened the amount of diseases spreading. An advocate for immigrants, the poor and women, at the age of twenty-nine Jane Addams established the Hull House in 1889, which opened its doors to European immigrants, providing them with food and shelter. Located in Chicago, the Hull House became the first settlement house in the United States. As a social reformer, Addams became the spokesperson for organized labors and was determined to eliminate poverty. Through her writing and speeches, Addams left a lasting impression on the nation during the Progressive Era; her commitment to immigrant communities, and similar to Jacob Riis in her work with wanting to improve slum-like communities, helped change the way people view impoverished living conditions and the things they do to improve them. Both Jane Addams and Jacob Riis did whatever they sought necessary to improve the conditions that immigrants encountered during the progressive era, both worked and successfully got the wealthy and the government to make a change in the way they handled those specific situations, all while influencing modern day. With what theyve done during the Progressive Era, Jane Addams and Jacob Riis made a key point in empathizing the needs for more jobs for immigrants and shelters for the less fortunate.

Merriam-Websters 2018 Words of the Year

Merriam-Websters 2018 Words of the Year Merriam-Webster’s 2018 Words of the Year Merriam-Webster’s 2018 Words of the Year By Mark Nichol Toward the end of every calendar year, Merriam-Webster, like other major dictionaries, shares a list of the words most frequently searched for on its website. As usual, this search traffic is largely driven by public discourse, as people look up words they see and hear in the media and in conversations, seeking to learn definitions of unfamiliar words or to clarify for themselves the meanings of words they know (or think they know). This post discusses Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2018 and ten runners-up. The Word of the Year, justice, was newsworthy in several contexts. The primary sense is that of administration or maintenance of fairness and lawfulness, and increasing concern about social justice has brought the concept, and the term that represents it, to the forefront in our society. But justice is a job title as well as a concept, referring to a judge on a national or state supreme court or similar body, and the controversy over confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court also led people to check the definition. (The senior member of a supreme court is often titled â€Å"chief justice,† while the others are designated â€Å"associate justices.†) Finally, on a more trivial note, the Justice League is a team of superheroes created for DC Comics and appearing in various media, including a film released late last year. The runners-up include nationalism, which has figured prominently in the media as the concept gains traction throughout the world, including in the United States, where President Donald Trump recently unabashedly identified himself as a nationalist. However, he, like many people, appears to be unclear on the concept: Nationalism is often conflated with patriotism. However, while the latter term refers to pride in one’s country, nationalism denotes loyalty to a nation at the expense of international (and intranational) harmony. Nationalism is closely associated with fascism, a political philosophy that incorporates dictatorial control and centralization of authority and brutal suppression of individuals and groups deemed undesirable or resistant to fascists’ goals. In summary, to be called a nationalist is decidedly not a compliment, and to call oneself a nationalist does not invite compliments. Pansexual, incorporating a Greek prefix meaning â€Å"all,† refers to a conception of gender identity and sexual orientation as something that occurs along a spectrum, rejecting the idea of binary categorization. Lodestar, originally denoting Polaris, the North Pole Star, which for millennia has served as a navigational aid, now refers more broadly to a guide, inspiration, or model. (Lode is a Middle English word meaning â€Å"course† or â€Å"way; it’s seen also in the context of mining: A lode is a deposit of ore.) The term had a vogue this year after it was used in an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times purportedly written by a senior Trump administration official. Because Vice President Mike Pence is known to use the fairly obscure term, some people suspected him of being the author. An epiphany is an appearance or manifestation, but the term is most commonly employed to refer to a realization or revelation. Its popularity as a search term early this year likely resulted from the Christian holiday by that name, which on January 6 commemorates the visit of the Magi, or Three Wise Men, to where the infant Jesus lay; it derives from the Greek verb epiphainein, meaning â€Å"manifest.† Feckless, used by a television commentator to criticize Ivanka Trump for, in her role as adviser to her father, failing to criticize the Trump administration’s immigration policies, employs the root feck, of Scottish origin, meaning â€Å"value† or â€Å"worth.† Essentially, it is a rare synonym for worthless. Laurel, the word for a tree whose foliage was used to crown victors in athletic events in ancient Greece, became a hot search term when a debate erupted online about which of two words was being enunciated in an online dictionary’s pronunciation sound file. By extension of its original definition, the term came to apply to the celebratory object itself and to figurative honors; one idiom based on the term is â€Å"rest on (one’s) laurels,† which alludes to someone who, upon achieving an honor, refrains from attempting feats that bring further recognition. (Usage generally pertains to one who does not rest on one’s laurels, meaning that person does seek other honors.) Pissant was frequently looked up after a radio personality described a famous football player’s daughter with the word, which is a derogatory dialectal term formed from piss and ant. (This word is not to be confused with puissant, a rare term meaning â€Å"powerful† and etymologically related to power and potent. All three words derive from the Latin term posse, meaning â€Å"able,† which survives in English as the term for a group deputized to pursue a fugitive or, more loosely, to denote one’s entourage.) The death this year of Aretha Franklin, best known for her rousing rendition of the song â€Å"Respect,† prompted look-ups of that word, which literally means â€Å"look back.† (The second syllable of that word, meaning â€Å"look,† is also the root of spectacle, spectator, inspect, suspect, and so on.) Maverick is a term often applied to the late John McCain, a US senator and presidential aspirant, for his frequent opposition to party-line politics. The word, describing someone who often acts without regard for group or party loyalty, derives from the surname of a gentleman who, after taking a small herd of cattle as payment for a debt, neglected to brand them, rendering them vulnerable to appropriation by other ranchers, who rounded them up on the open range and applied their own brands to the livestock. Since then, the word has been a synonym for independent, though â€Å"stolen from a careless owner† would be a more appropriate association. The death of Marvel Comics mogul Stan Lee this year resulted in references to excelsior, the word with which Lee typically signed off in the columns he wrote for his company’s comic books. Though the primary meaning of the word is mundane- it was a trademark for a brand of wood shavings used as protective packing material and later a generic term- its origin is the Latin word meaning â€Å"higher†; excel, excellent, and so on are related. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:What Is Irony? (With Examples)Precedent vs. PrecedenceQuiet or Quite?