Muckrakers & Reformers Primary Sources

The full text of How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis's groundbreaking 1890 exposé on American tenements, is available online in hypertext from Yale University.

Theodore Roosevelt's famous 1906 speech on "the Man with the Muck Rake."

A 1913 temperance pamphlet attempts to draw a connection between social "degeneracy" and the prevalence of alcoholism.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union Band Song, composed by Minne M. Moede in 1914.

You can read the 25 January 1919 edition of American Issue online. This temperance publication discussed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which inaugurated the Prohibition period in the United States.

Prominent black feminist Mary Church Terrell, president of the National Association of Colored Women, reported on "The progress of colored women" at the NAWSA fiftieth anniversary meeting in Washington, D.C., on 18 February 1898. The text of her speech is available from the Library of Congress.