This book analyzes the National Police Gazette, the racy New York City tabloid that gained an audience among men and boys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at how images of sex, crime, and sports reflected and shaped masculinities during this watershed era, this book amounts to a story of what it meant to be an American man at the beginning of the American Century.

This book analyzes the National Police Gazette, the racy New York City tabloid that gained an audience among men and boys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at how images of sex, crime, and sports reflected and shaped masculinities during this watershed era, this book amounts to a story of what it meant to be an American man at the beginning of the American Century.

Patrick S. Washburn and Chris Lamb tell the full story of the past, the present, and to a degree, the future of American sports journalism. Sports Journalism chronicles how and why technology, religion, social movements, immigration, racism, sexism, social media, athletes, and sportswriters and broadcasters changed sports as well as how sports are covered and how news about sports are presented and disseminated. One of the influential factors in sports coverage is the upswing in the number of women sports reporters in the last forty years. Sports Journalism also examines the ethics of sports journalism, how sports coverage frequently has differed from that of non-sports news, and how the internet has spawned a set of new ethical issues.

The fascinating story of the most notorious detective agency in US history. Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was at the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital’s tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O’Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from angry strikers. O’Hara argues that American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.

You can hardly pass through customs at an airport today without having your picture taken and your fingertips scanned, that information then stored in an archive you'll never see. Nor can you use your home's smart technology without wondering what, exactly, that technology might do with all you've shared with it: shopping habits, security decisions, media choices. Every day, Americans surrender their private information to entities that claim to have their best interests in mind, in exchange for a promise of safety or convenience. This trade-off has long been taken for granted, but the extent of its nefariousness has recently become much clearer. As Lawrence Cappello's None of Your Damn Business reveals, the problem is not so much that data will be used in ways we don't want, but rather how willing we have been to have our information used, abused, and sold right back to us. In this startling book, Cappello shows that this state of affairs was not the inevitable by-product of technological progress. He targets key moments from the past 130 years of US history when privacy was central to battles over journalistic freedom, national security, surveillance, big data, and reproductive rights. As he makes dismayingly clear, Americans have had numerous opportunities to protect the public good while simultaneously safeguarding personal information, and we've squandered them every time. The wide range of the debates and incidents presented here shows that, despite America's endless rhetoric or individual freedom, we actually have some of the weakest privacy protections in the developed world. None of Your Damn Business is a rich and provocative survey of an alarming topic that grows only more relevant with each fresh outrage of trust betrayed. -- Dust jacket flap.

Despite the claims of Steven Pinker and others, violence has remained a historical constant since the Enlightenment, even though its forms and visibility have been radically transformed. Accordingly, the studies gathered here recast debate over violence in modern societies by undermining teleological and reassuring narratives of progress.