one of his favorite authors was james denmark cooper. -- james fenimore cooper. he had this vision as many scandinavians did that america was the wild west. he said we did not know the difference between east and west. here he is, gets out in a metropolis and there are no buffaloes. the first thing he did was he bought a revolver. he was making fun of himself. he was making jokes in his lecture. this is a funny story about this green kid getting off the boat and buying a revolver he strapped outside of his coat. he was stretching down broadway and a policeman stops him and says you may want to get rid of the gun. it is a funny story. it actually was a very hard time for jacob riis when he first came. he had a lot of difficulty making a living, finding work, he was unable to find steady work. he worked a lot of jobs. he got very depressed. one of the things we are showing from the new york public library is a wonderful early diary of his written partly in danish and then he switches to english. in the diary, it is about his loneliness when he first came here and h

in his autobiography he mentioned he loved james fenimore cooper's stories of american indians, and when he arrived in new york, he purchased a gun, which he brandished and narrowly escaped getting arrested. his desire to reinvent himself in a new land was a common 19th century story. america was built by waves of european immigrants, irish, germans, chinese, scandinavians, italians and jews. between 1870 and 1900 a tenth of all danes left home for america. these, by the way, are riis' slides in his own autobiographic lecture. these are a copy of these slides, which are in this collection here. most danish immigrants traveled to the midwest as homesteaders and in many instances they founded their own communities. by contrast, riis spend five years wandering from place to place, job to job, failing to establish a foothold time and again. the immigrants' sense of alienation, of being caught between old and new and feeling misunderstood was perhaps extreme in riis' case. explaining why he slept on this gravestone in new brunswick, new jersey, riis wrote "the night dews and snakes and dogs t