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.

"For several decades following the end of the Civil War, the most popular sport in the United States was walking. Professional pedestrians often covered 500 miles or more for up to six grueling days and nights in pursuit of large money prizes in competitions held in big-city arenas. Walking was also a favorite amateur sport; newspapers often noted a "pedestrian mania" or "walking fever" that only began to give way in the mid-1880s to fast-rising crazes for baseball, bicycling, and roller-skating. As competitive walking faded, however, another kind of walking that had also begun in the late 1860s came to full flower. Between 1890 and 1930, hundreds of men, women, even children and entire families were on the nation's roads and railroad tracks trekking between widely separated points-frequently New York and San Francisco-and sometimes moving in unusual ways, such as on roller-skates or by walking barefooted, backwards, on stilts, or while rolling a hoop. To finance their attention-seeking journeys, many sold souvenir postcards. Although they claimed various reasons for making these treks, for most the treks clearly were a means of personal expression. The public usually found these performers entertaining, but public officials and newspaper editors often denounced them as nuisances or frauds. Tapping vintage postcards and old newspaper articles, this is the first book to bring back to view this once-familiar feature of American life. Following a prologue providing background and context, five chapters address different aspects of this trekking phenomenon. In 106 illustrations and seventy-six vignettes-some poignant, many amusing, all engaging-the book provides a fair representation of the many trekkers who moved across the country during those years. An epilogue offers some final musings about those trekking performers and their place in the annals of American popular culture"--

The “enormously entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) account of a shocking 1897 murder mystery that “artfully re-create[s] the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off” (The New York Times) AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME • “Fascinating . . . won’t disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.”—The Washington Post On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that forever changed newspaper journalism.

David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla have gathered a colourful collection of essays exploring sensationalism in nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. The contributors analyse the role of sensationalism and tell the story of both the rise of the penny press in the 1830s and the careers of specific editors and reporters dedicated to this particular journalistic style.Divided into four sections, the first, titled "The Many Faces of Sensationalism," provides an eloquent Defense of yellow journalism, analyses the place of sensational pictures, and provides a detailed examination of the changes in reporting over a twenty-year span. The second part, "Mudslinging, Muckraking, Scandals, and Yellow Journalism," focuses on sensationalism and the American presidency as well as why journalistic muckraking came to fruition in the Progressive Era.The third section, "Murder, Mayhem, Stunts, Hoaxes, and Disasters," features a ground-breaking discussion of the place of religion and death in nineteenth-century newspapers. The final section explains the connection between sensationalism and hatred. This is a must-read book for any historian, journalist, or person interested in American culture.

Presents comprehensive guidance to the international field of sports history as it has developed as an academic area of study. This book guides readers through the development of the field across a range of thematic and geographical contexts. It is suitable for researchers and students in, and entering, the sports history field.

A Companion to American Sport History presents a collection of original essays that represent the first comprehensive analysis of scholarship relating to the growing field of American sport history. Presents the first complete analysis of the scholarship relating to the academic history of American sport Features contributions from many of the finest scholars working in the field of American sport history Includes coverage of the chronology of sports from colonial times to the present day, including major sports such as baseball, football, basketball, boxing, golf, motor racing, tennis, and track and field Addresses the relationship of sports to urbanization, technology, gender, race, social class, and genres such as sports biography Awarded 2015 Best Anthology from the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH)

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.

Throughout America's past, some men have feared the descent of their gender into effeminacy, and turned their eyes to the ring in hopes of salvation. This work explains how the dominant fight sports in the United States have changed over time in response to broad shifts in American culture and ideals of manhood, and presents a narrative of American history as seen from the bars, gyms, stadiums and living rooms of the heartland. Ordinary Americans were the agents who supported and participated in fight sports and determined its vision of masculinity. This work counters the economic determinism prevalent in studies of American fight sports, which overemphasize profit as the driving force in the popularization of these sports. The author also disputes previous scholarship's domestic focus, with an appreciation of how American fight sports are connected to the rest of the world.

Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from telegraphy to railroads. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture. One of the great subjects of the lithography boom was an emerging Euro-American colony in the Americas: Texas. The most complete collection of its kind—and quite possibly the most complete visual record of nineteenth-century Texas, period—Texas Lithographs is a gateway to the history of the Lone Star State in its most formative period. Ron Tyler assembles works from 1818 to 1900, many created by outsiders and newcomers promoting investment and settlement in Texas. Whether they depict the early French colony of Champ d’Asile, the Republic of Texas, and the war with Mexico, or urban growth, frontier exploration, and the key figures of a nascent Euro-American empire, the images collected here reflect an Eden of opportunity—a fairy-tale dream that remains foundational to Texans’ sense of self and to the world’s sense of Texas.