# data[].attributes.body
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RxuupaMYwOC1yl8rhGWpIXZN_VGTabkn5sq8GT_4td0/edit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Writing the War: The Literary Effects of World War One

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
World War One was a cataclysmic event not only in terms of world history, but also for the literary world. The war's extreme brutality led to an outpouring of literature concerning its conduct and effects that began with the war poets themselves, extended through the interwar period, and reappeared periodically throughout the twentieth century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1870, when Jacob August Riis immigrated to America from Denmark on the steamship Iowa, he rode in steerage with nothing but the clothes on his back, 40 borrowed dollars in his pocket, and a locket containing a single hair from the girl he loved. It must have been hard for the 21-year-old Riis to imagine that in just a few short years, he would be pallin' around with a future president, become a pioneer in photojournalism, and help reform housing policy in New York City.

Jacob Riis, who died 100 years ago this month, struggled through his first few years in the United States. Unable to find a steady job, he worked as a farmhand, ironworker, brick-layer, carpenter, and salesman, and experienced the worst aspects of American urbanism--crime, sickness, squalor--in the low-rent tenements and lodging houses that would eventually inspire the young Danish immigrant to dedicate himself to improving living conditions for the city's lower-class.

Through a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, he got a job as a journalist and a platform for exposing the plight of the lower class community. Eventually, Riis became a police reporter for The New York Tribune, covering some of the city's most crime-ridden districts, a job that would would lead to fame and a friendship with police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who called Riis "the best American I ever knew." Riis knew what it was to suffer, to starve, and to be homeless, and, though his prose was sometimes sensationalist and even occasionally prejudiced, he had what Roosevelt called "the great gift of making others see what he saw and feel what he felt."

But Riis wanted to literally show the the world what he saw. So, to help his readers truly understand the dehumanizing dangers of the immigrant neighborhoods he knew all too well, Riis taught himself photography and began taking a camera with him on his nightly rounds. The recent invention of flash photography made it possible to document the dark, over-crowded tenements, grim saloons and dangerous slums. Riis's pioneering use of flash photography brought to light even the darkest parts of the city. Used in articles, books, and lectures, his striking compositions became powerful tools for social reform.

Riis's 1890 treatise of social criticism How the Other Half Lives was written in the belief "that every man's experience ought to be worth something to the community from which he drew it, no matter what that experience may be, so long as it was gleaned along the line of some decent, honest work." Full of unapologetically harsh accounts of life in the worst slums of New York, fascinating and terrible statistics on tenement living, and reproductions of his revelatory photographs, How the Other Half Lives
was a shock to many New Yorkers - and an immediate success. Not only did it sell well, but it inspired Roosevelt to close the worst of the lodging houses and spurred city officials to reform and enforce the city's housing policies. To once again quote the future President of the United States: "The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent every encountered by them in New York City."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pioneering Social Reformer Jacob Riis Revealed "How The Other Half Lives" in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How innovations in photography helped this 19th century journalist improve life for many of his fellow immigrants

# data[].attributes.body
Dresden

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bombing of Dresden - World War II - HISTORY.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find out more about the history of Bombing of Dresden, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mass and Popular Culture - American Literature - Oxford Bibliographies - obo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A relatively young tradition in world letters, American literature matured over a period that coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism and the birth of consumer society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Harold Bloom famously dubbed it the "anxiety of influence" (paywall): the effect which the literary canon has on writers. Less today than it did in the past, according to a mathematical study which analysed thousands of works written over the last 500 years.

American mathematicians, led by the chair of Dartmouth College mathematics department Professor Daniel Rockmore, set out to investigate "large-scale" trends in literary style. Using digitised works in the Project Gutenberg library, they processed 7,733 works from 537 authors written after the year 1550, were looking for the frequency at which 307 "content-free" words - such as "of", "at" and "by" - appeared. They called these words the "syntactic glue" of language: "words that carry little meaning on their own but form the bridge between words that convey meaning", and thus "provide a useful stylistic fingerprint" for authorship.

"When we consider content-free word frequencies from a large number of authors and works over a long period of time, we can ask questions related to temporal trends in similarity", they write in their new paper, "Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature".

After finding that authors of any given period are stylistically similar to their contemporaries, they also discovered that the stylistic influence of the past is decreasing. While authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead "strongly influenced" by writers from their own decade. "The so-called 'anxiety of influence', whereby authors are understood in terms of their response to canonical precursors, is becoming an 'anxiety of impotence', in which the past exerts a diminishing stylistic influence on the present," they write. This could, they suggest, be explained by the modernist movement, in which authors "reject their immediate stylistic predecessors yet remain a part of a dominant movement that included many of their contemporaries".

There are also, they point out, more books available to read these days. "One hypothesis is that there is so much more to read now and more kinds of 'important' work that if we believe that style is influenced by what one reads, then it is less likely that people generally devote the preponderance of their reading to the older 'classics'," said Rockmore. "This is not unrelated to the acknowledged gradual diminishment of a canon in literature. If one believes that writing style is significantly related to spoken language, then it might be traced to the rapid evolution of that form of communication."

The paper only covers works written up to 1952, because of copyright issues, but Rockmore believes the decreasing influence of the canon will only have continued in the authors of today. The Orange prize-winning novelist Lionel Shriver agreed this was probably true in her case - and suggested it was likely to apply to her contemporaries as well. "About all I can do is confess that while I myself devoured classics in my teens and 20s - even 30s, come to think of it - I now read contemporary fiction almost exclusively," she said. "I feel ambivalent about this evolution, but between reviewing, blurbing occasionally, and keeping up with what's out there on general principle I don't often get around to touching base with the literary canon. When I have tried to, say, reread a Dostoevsky novel, I've discovered that I don't have the patience any longer - for the long philosophical digressions, for example. I bet I'm not alone in this reduced tolerance for the stylistic traditions of the past."

Rockmore said he hoped to talk to literary colleagues to investigate if the mathematicians' formulae could be applied to literary criticism. "I do believe it is an interesting approach to literary analysis," he said. "We are hopeful that we can engage some colleagues expert in those areas to find what the interesting questions are. That is a necessary first step and we look forward to collaborations to those ends."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Influence of classic literature on writers declining, study claims

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Harold Bloom famously dubbed it the "anxiety of influence" (paywall): the effect which the literary canon has on writers. Less today than it did in the past, according to a mathematical study which analysed thousands of works written over the last 500 years.