Comparative Research
I chose to compare how rape was reported on in The Caucasian in comparison to how it was reported on in The Morning Appeal, a newspaper from Carson City, Nevada. One significant difference in the reporting was that I discovered that The Morning Appeal was much less likely to define the race of the people involved in a crime than The Caucasian was. In the Appeal, a story was run in 1880 describing how a young man, Charles T. Pohl, was almost lynched for allegedly assaulting a seven year old girl. In The Caucasian, the only lynchings that I found reported on were committed against black suspects, and Pohl’s race was not defined in the article published in the Appeal. I suspect that this is due in part to the fact that North Carolina experienced legal segregation under Jim Crow laws during this period, while Nevada did not. This added a racial dimension to NC’s state legal system that may not have been present everywhere across the US. The tone of the writing in The Morning Appeal was a little more sensationalistic than the writing in The Caucasian, with articles given titles like “Brutes of the Circus Ring,” while many of the crimes reported in The Caucasian were reported in collected columns like “Local Matters” and “State News.” This is likely due in part to changes in how crimes were reported over time; around the turn of the 20th Century, crime reporting shifted somewhat from an editorialized and moralistic style to a more fact-based and procedural tone. In The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South, Michael Trotti wrote “Between the Civil War and the Progressive Era, public narratives of crime became more detailed, exhaustive, reasoned, and objective, mirroring a shift in cultural mentality from Victorian to modern.” (Michael Trotti, “The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South,” University of North Carolina Press, (2018): 80) So the earlier articles in The Morning Appeal are more reflective of the Victorian style of crime reporting, especially the reporting of “moral crimes.”