Assault in the Topeka State Journal, 1900 & 1920

Historian Joshua Stein argued in 2012 that the legal understanding of assault shifted in the first half of the nineteenth century, away from an emphasis on the public harm of acts to a focus on the injury suffered by an individual. As a result, there was more scope to justify individual acts of violence, and a new burden on the accuser not the accused to establish that an assault had taken place.

The statutes in effect in Kansas in the first two decades of the 20th century reflected that new emphasis on severity of violence as necessary to constitute an assault. The law treated most seriously, as felonies, assaults with deadly weapons, or of such violence that the victim was maimed wounded or disfigured. Other beatings or wounds amounted to less serious crimes, misdemeanours.

• Assault with deadly weapon. § 38. Every person who shall, on purpose and of malice aforethought, shoot at or stab another, or assault or beat another, or assault or beat another with a deadly weapon, or by any other means or force likely to produce death or great bodily harm, with intent to kill, maim, ravish or rob such person, or in the attempt to commit any burglary or other felony, or in resisting the execution of legal process, shall be punished by confinement and hard labor for a term not exceeding ten years.
• Great bodily harm. § 42. If any person shall be maimed, wounded or disfigured, or receive great bodily harm, or his life be endangered by the act, procurement or culpable negligence of another, in cases and under circumstances which would constitute murder or manslaughter if death had ensued, the person by whose act, procurement or negligence such injury or danger of life shall be occasioned shall, in cases not otherwise provided for, be punished by confinement and hard labor not exceeding five years, or in a county jail not less than six months.
• Assault and battery. § 43. Any person who shall assault, or beat, or wound another under such circumstances as not to constitute any other offense herein defined, shall upon conviction thereof be fined in a sum not exceeding five hundred dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year. 

The assaults reported in the Topeka State Journal do not feature severe violence; instead they seem to be reported because of who is involved in the assault. The majority are beatings, with a handful of stabbings and one shooting. The stories also include five cases linked to lynchings, where the alleged crime is reported as a "criminal assault." That likely refers to a rape not an assault, but that phrase is used only in the context of lynchings.

<How are they reported, in terms of the approach and style of newspaper crime reporting>