How does Upton Sinclair's The Jungle contribute to Historiography?

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It has been said that Sinclair's "Jungle" was "aimed for the [American] public's heart and hit it in the stomach." That is to say that the main result was widespread calls for a reform of food processing practices, and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration to oversee this

Sinclair was decidedly left of center, probably socialist, and his book may have contributed to the mid-Western based "Progressivism" of people like Robert LaFollete of Wisconsin. But the main impact of this work was not "political," but rather "regulatory."

While regulation has a political component, it is the province of centrist "good government" types, rather than radicals on either side. Sinclair's book did only a little to wins socialist converts, but a lot to win reform of food processing, and contributed to the beginning of the environmental movement. (The book was published during the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, a leading, and early, environmentalist.)

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Upton Sinclair's work put him in the vanguard of several historiographical movements: people's history, muckraking, and undercover journalism. His attention to common people's experiences seems to be overshadowed by the memory of his seminal acts of journalism.

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