Thursday, Feb 7 Letter from Birmingham Jail

For Friday, February 15    Thanatopsis essay.   Jamichael , Sierra and Ariana have yet to see me about the poem.
For Monday, February 11...please have read excerpts from Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives and complete the study guide questions, making sure to use textual information in your responses. class hanout / copy below
note: I am not in class tomorrow; so you will have that time to work on the material. Mr. Greven will be here.

In class, you will be assigned one of the following in relation to King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)   by Martin Luther King

 1. How does King dismantle the argument the clergymen and others have made about "outside agitation?" What four steps does King say are necessary in every nonviolent campaign? How does he say that his followers and allies have carried out these steps in seeking to achieve racial justice in Birmingham? According to King, what is the immediate purpose of direct, nonviolent action? Why does he believe that the peaceful protests he has been organizing throughout the South do not amount to merely passive behavior, but instead rise to the level of dramatic action?

2. What seems to be the proper relation between the individual and the community and between the local community and society in the broader sense? Track as many of the letter's references as you can to the great personages and events of history. Why are there so many of them, and why does King also weave in so many references to the ordinary person--as in the passage beginning "We know from painful experience . . ." as well? Find some instances in which he classifies individuals and groups, whether for better or for worse. Why does he keep doing that?

If you loose your copy, please go to http://www.bartleby.com/208/  Read the Genesis of the Tenement, The Italian in New York, Chinatown, Jewtown and The Color Line in New York.

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.  Study guide questions. These are due on Monday, February 11.

Make sure to use textual evidence in your responses.

Please read the introductory material first.

The following is taken from Jacob A. Riis, How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner, 1901) Dover Edition published 1971 in paperback by Dover Publications, Inc.

In 1890, New York Tribune reporter Jacob A. Riis set fire to the city's social reform movement with the publication of How the Other Half Lives. Riis' book used graphic descriptions, sketches, photographs, and cold statistics to chronicle the squalor of New York's East Side slum district. The result, as the preface to the Dover edition states, "quickly became a landmark in the annals of social reform." With remorseless candor, he documents the filth, disease, exploitation, and overcrowding that characterized the experience of more than one million immigrants. Riis helped push tenement reform to the front of New York's political agenda, and prompted Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to call him "the most useful citizen of New York."

Riis writes to exhort, and his book is thick with indignation at the callousness of the middle and upper classes. Much of his sympathy for the poor likely came from his own experience as an immigrant. Riis came to New York in 1870, just as the economy was beginning to slow. He spent years precariously teetering between joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. Finally, in 1877, he took a job as a police reporter for the Tribune and set out on a career of chronicling crime and poverty.

Riis greatly admired the reporting of Charles Dickens, who wrote about London's poor, and much of Riis' writing style reflects Dickens' first-person encounters with the "other half." Riis, however, frequently wrote with a sense of righteousness that is lacking in his British counterpart. To the modern reader, Riis' diatribes sometimes come across as pedantic. His writing also reflects many of the prejudices of the time; he spends entire chapters characterizing (caricaturizing) the Jews, Italians, and Irish that made up the tenement district. It is worth bearing in mind here that Riis was writing for a specific audience, and was therefore playing upon the biases of that audience. Even in his most racially insensitive passages, he still writes with a genuine sympathy for his subjects. Thus, as a work of journalism and of social criticism, Riis' book still stands as a truly seminal text.

I.                    Genesis of the Tenement

1.       What is the “mark of Cain?

2.       Define promiscuous

3.       Who were the Knickerbockers and what happened to them?

4.       How were the former homes of the Knickerbockers organized?

5.       Define garret

6.       Define slovenliness

7.       Who was responsible for the condition of the property?

8.       How were the houses reorganized to make more money?

9.       How did the cholera epidemic impact the tenement community?

10.   Define cupidity

11.   Compare the population per square mile of the tenements to Old London.

12.   How did the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor sum up the situation in the tenements?

 I

II.                  The Italian in New York

1.       How is the Italian welcomed into New York?

2.       Define tractability

3.       Why do Italians need recourse to the middle man?

4.       Define extortionate

5.       Define maxim

6.       Define desultory

7.       Describe the Italians source of revenue.

8.       Define augurs

9.       What do the Italians do for recreation?

10.   Define swarthy

11.   What are the Italians redeeming traits?

III.                Chinatown

1.       On what does Riis base his observation of “Joss”?

2.       For what reason do the Chinese people adopt Christianity?

3.       How does Chinatown compare to the Bend, where the Italians live?

4.       In what way are the Chinese compared to a cat?

5.       What’s to be found in open cellarways?

6.       Where are the Chines women?

7.       How does opium affect the community? (use text!)

8.       Define scrupulous

9.       Define dissipated

10.   What purpose the telegraph serve in Chinatown?

11.   What is Riis’ attitude, considering that the Chinese are there to stay in New York?

IV  Jewtown

1.       How are the Jews employed?

2.       Define houris

3.       What is the Jewish populations attitude towards thrift?

4.       Define penury

5.       What helps the Jews survive their years of bondage?

6.       What recreation is enjoyed in Jewtown?

7.       Describe a Jewish house of mourning.

8.       What exactly was the outcome of the fire that was set in the tenement?

9.       Define rumpus

10.   Define perambulate

          V The Color Line in New York

1.       Define ukase

2.       Where does the black population reside?

3.       What is the black population’s attitude towards cleanliness?

4.       Define hegira

5.       What is the black population’s attitude towards life?

6.       What is the “negros’” ambition?

7.       Define turpitude

8.       What has hindered the “negro” from improving his social condition?