After the fact: historical perspectives and implications

¶ … Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle. Specifically it will discuss chapter nine from the book. This chapter discusses the immigrants coming to this country, including the idea of social reform and the "degrading" conditions of the slums in cities such as New York City.

The times were difficult and businesspeople exploited their workers, underpaid them, and even exploited children workers, and they lived in terrible conditions. Jacob Riis, a New York reporter, reported on the conditions immigrants faced in the slums. The text notes, "He began to visit immigrants in their homes, where he observed their continual struggle to preserve a measure of decency in an environment of chronic unemployment, disease, crime, and cultural dislocation" (p. 190). This evidence he left behind, along with many other studies and accounts, indicate how terrible the living conditions were, and how people who could have made sweeping changes often simply ignored the situation, allowing it to continue when it could have been stopped.

Photographs help get the living conditions and how society allowed them to continue across exceedingly well, because they graphically show the conditions, so they are hard to ignore. The authors note that the camera records details forever and sometimes even details that are not apparent to the naked eye, and so, they paint a very vivid picture of whatever they are portraying, and they allow people to look at conditions as if they were looking through a window (p. 192). That means that people cannot ignore the truth when confronted with pictures of poverty, and they many even influence them to do something about the conditions they would rather ignore. Photographs capture a moment in time, they offer lasting evidence about a very precise moment, and in the case of history, they record significant occurrences for posterity, giving them a true idea of what life was like at that one, brief moment in time.

Legislation indicates that the meat packing industry and labor needed reforming, which is why the legislation occurred. The government became involved because again, working conditions and the greed of the business owners was not controlled, and many of them exploited their workers and had no thought of sanitation or safety. Legislation occurs because something needs to be changed or reformed, and that is what the legislation regarding labor and the meat packing industry was meant to do. It was meant to create better working conditions, shorter work weeks, better pay, and to provide a sanitary and safe work environment, because all of these had been missing before.