The name Jacob August Riis is an obscure one today, known only perhaps to scholars of American journalism and photography.  He was a Danish-American journalist, and he lived from 1849 to May 26, 1914.  He produced excellent work in his day; his photographs of the New York slums were influential in helping promote social reforms that eased the lives of the urban poor.  His 1890 volume How the Other Half Lives:  Studies Among The Tenements Of New York constitutes an important record of the squalid conditions of the Gilded Age’s downtrodden.