Five Points by Tyler Arbinder, describes the what is known to be one of the worst slums in the world during the nineteenth century known as Five Points. What is now known as present day Chinatown, Five Points had a dangerous concentration of uneducated and ignorant Irish, Italian, Chinese, German, African-American, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Because of the lack of morals of the people who resided in the area, Five Points had the most violence, crimes and unsanitary amongst the poor districts.
One if the sources mentioned in Arbinder’s text is Harper’s Weekly which was a newspaper that depicted the the situations of the area during that time such as the over-crowding and the suffering of the people. This would be considered as a primary source because this newspaper existed during the time when the Five Points district existed and had pictures of the actual situation during that time.
Another piece of writing was written by Herbert Ausbury, The Gangs of New York, which depicted the distortions of the people who lived in Five Points. This piece of work, however, is an unreliable secondary source because it was not only written a couple of decades after the slum existed but also that the author easily accepted almost every of his sources as fact which could mean that some of the stories told may have been false.
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 was written by Christine Stansell which describes the role of the females during that time. This is a secondary reliable source because although the excerpt was not written during that time, Stansell effectively describes the many causes and effects of the immense poverty of the working-class women of the nineteenth century.
Gang members in an alley way in the Five Points district. This area was notoriously known for its crime, violence and emergence of gangs.