Use Of Evidence>Evidence Practice Test

Some historians have portrayed the 1890s urban reform movement as a moral crusade against corruption. By contrast, I argue that its animating force was the economic hardship felt by wage workers in industrial neighborhoods. Reformers spoke the language of civic cleanliness and good government, but their meetings were held in union halls and tenement courtyards; their pamphlets decried rent hikes and irregular pay. When factories ran short hours after financial panics, reform petitions surged; when wages stabilized, momentum ebbed. To see the movement as primarily moralistic is to miss what its participants said and where they came from: blocks of overcrowded housing clustered around mills and docks. The moral rhetoric gave the cause legitimacy across classes, but the spark was material: the pinch of shrinking pay envelopes and rising costs of coal, bread, and rooms.

Critics often treat the epic's latest English translation as an ode to its solitary hero. I contend, however, that the translator consistently redirects attention from individual glory to communal duty. Where the original ambiguously attributes triumph to a single champion, this version distributes agency across companions and townspeople. The translator prefers verbs of coordination—'gather,' 'brace,' 'share'—and frequently shifts singular boasts into plural resolve. Even the victory scenes swell with images of collective labor: doors heaved open by many hands, roads rebuilt by neighbors. This is not to deny the hero's presence, but to note how the translation invites readers to admire the web of obligations that sustains him. If we are to judge the translation's emphasis, we should look for lines where the 'I' dissolves into 'we' and the heroic act becomes a communal undertaking.