These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news--indeed to achieve star billing--and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.

Randall Sumpter questions the dominant notion that reporters entering the field in the late nineteenth century relied on an informal apprenticeship system to learn the rules of journalism. Drawing from the experiences of more than fifty reporters, he argues that cub reporters could and did access multiple sources of instruction, including autobiographies and memoirs of journalists, fiction, guidebooks, and trade magazines. Arguments for “professional journalism” did not resonate with the workaday journalists examined here. These news workers were more concerned with following a personal rather than a professional code of ethics, and implemented their own work rules. Some of those rules governed “delinquent” behavior. While scholars have traced some of the connections between beginning journalists and learning opportunities, Sumpter shows that much more can be discovered, with implications for understanding the development of journalistic professionalism and present-day instances of journalistic behavior.

American newspapers redefined journalism after the Civil War by breaking away from the editorial and financial control of the Democratic and Republican parties. Smythe chronicles the rise of the New Journalism, where pegging newspaper sales to market forces was the cost of editorial independence. Successful papers in post-bellum America thrived by catering to a mass audience, which increased their circulations and raised their advertising revenues. Still active politically, independent editors now sought to influence their readers' opinions themselves rather than serve as conduits for the party line.

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

In this wonderfully illustrated book, Joshua Brown shows that the wood engravings in the illustrated newspapers of Gilded Age America were more than a quaint predecessor to our own sophisticated media. As he tells the history and traces the influence of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, with relevant asides to Harper's Weekly, the New York Daily Graphic, and others, Brown recaptures the complexity and richness of pictorial reporting. He finds these images to be significant barometers for gauging how the general public perceived pivotal events and crises—the Civil War, Reconstruction, important labor battles, and more. This book is the best available source on the pictorial riches of Frank Leslie's newspaper and the only study to situate these images fully within the social context of Gilded Age America. Beyond the Lines illuminates the role of illustration in nineteenth-century America and gives us a new look at how the social milieu shaped the practice of illustrated journalism and was in turn shaped by it.