...Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote his book The Jungle in 1906. This book was a huge success. Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland. Sinclair grew up poor with his mother and father. His mother sent him to his richer family on his mother's side. He started to write children’s stories and humor pieces in magazines at age 14. He also he started writing stories at age 16. At 18, he graduated from New York City University. After the success of The Jungle, Sinclair started to write more books with a political message. To write the book, The Jungle, Sinclair had to go undercover at a meat packing factory and expose how the industry had mistreated workers and had unsanitary conditions. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is the book that he is most known for because it was able to change the law, it fit into a popular kind of writing called muckraking, and his political views were different from most peoples’ in America....
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...Muckraking, from its beginning in the Progressive era, up until now has been a way of ‘beast-slaying, exposing the dirty underbelly of the gargantuan corporate and political monsters that have plagued our country. Muckraking presents their secrets to the general public. It has, more often than not, been the catalyst for great change in legislation. And the battle hasn’t necessarily always been publishing investigative articles in newspapers. Photographs, fictional covers for extremely truthful situations, television, and social media have all been used as tools to publish findings. This powerful tradition continues today. These unconventional ‘weapons’ are extremely compelling and effective in spreading the knowledge of issues, thereby putting more power into influencing changes in both private and government policies. A major problem in the United States during the early 20th Century was the issue of Child Labor. Children were being put to work instead of being educated....
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...Impacts of The Jungle on American Society As Judith Lewis Herman exhorted in her novel, Trauma and Recovery, "The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (“Trauma and Recovery Quotes”). However, a nationwide nerve was struck when the grotesque meat- packing industry was revealed by Upton Sinclair. He blazoned to Americans across the country the lurid details of the industry though his novel, The Jungle, a novel which changed American history. [This scathing review on the meat packing industry with socialist undertones brought an advent of great social and legal change to the United States.] With its stunning entrance into American literature in 1906, The Jungle created an uproar that has endured over a century since its publication. Upton Sinclair was an ardent proponent of socialism in America and yearned to reform the ailing country (Fogel). His novel was produced as a metaphor, comparing a jungle directly to the corrupt meat packing industry based in Chicago. Sinclair sought to expose the unknown atrocities hidden in the meat packing industry, which was not forced to obey any form of regulation (Shafer). Sinclair wrote that, “It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory” (Sinclair 56). This fictional piece of literature brought America to a screeching halt. Never before had such a bold statement been made about an industry that affected almost every single American. Upton’s...
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...On February 26, 1906, Upton Sinclair released The Jungle, a novel written about the life of a Lithuanian family moving to America and the hardships they faced there. Sinclair, a Socialist and a muckraker reporter wrote the novel in hopes of gaining supporters of the Socialist party. What he ended up doing was single handily cause the formation of the Food and Drug Administration after he showed the nation what was really happening with their food. Yet looking at the work as what it’s meant to be, an exposure of the negative effects of a capitalist society on the impoverished citizens, was Sinclair’s indictment a fair assessment. The novel The Jungle, follows the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his new family as they move to America in search of...
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...ourselves. His most notable work was The Jungle in which he exposed the American public to the inhumane and hazardous conditions of the meat packing industry and the injustices faced by immigrants. Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland to an alcoholic father whom he was named after and his...
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...Law Mr. Peter Barton Hutt Harvard Law School Winter 2004 Introduction In 1906 Congress passed two landmark pieces of legislation: the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The acts emerged from the reformist ethos of the Progressive Era, a time when the federal government took on a new and much more active role in the everyday lives of ordinary Americans. Of all the laws passed during the Progressive Era, no legislation proved more successful and more enduring than the 1906 food and drug legislation. The acts established the foundations of modern American food and drug law, and gave birth to the Food and Drug Administration. For the first time, the federal government assumed permanent and comprehensive responsibility for the health and safety of the American food and drug supply. Although the statutes have been revised many times since 1906, the essence of modern food and drug law remains consistent with the principles of federal responsibility for consumer safety that underlay the first statutes a century ago. The passage of the 1906 food and drug legislation stemmed from the actions of many people across the political landscape, ranging from Senator Albert Beveridge to socialist writer Upton Sinclair. But no indi- 1 viduals played a larger public role in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act than Theodore Roosevelt and Harvey Wiley. Roosevelt, as president of the United States, and Wiley, as chief chemist of the Agriculture...
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...CALIFORNIA CALIFORNIA An Interpretive History TENTH EDITION James J. Rawls Instructor of History Diablo Valley College Walton Bean Late Professor of History University of California, Berkeley TM TM CALIFORNIA: AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY, TENTH EDITION Published by McGraw-Hill, a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright © 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Previous editions © 2008, 2003, and 1998. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning. Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the United States. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1234567890 QFR/QFR 10987654321 ISBN: 978-0-07-340696-1 MHID: 0-07-340696-1 Vice President & Editor-in-Chief: Michael Ryan Vice President EDP/Central Publishing Services: Kimberly Meriwether David Publisher: Christopher Freitag Sponsoring Editor: Matthew Busbridge Executive Marketing Manager: Pamela S. Cooper Editorial Coordinator: Nikki Weissman Project Manager: Erin Melloy Design Coordinator: Margarite Reynolds Cover Designer: Carole Lawson Cover Image: Albert Bierstadt, American (born...
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