Crime Over Time
From the 1900s to the 1910s, the number of cases of rape reported on in The Caucasian increased dramatically. There are several reasons why this could be. The first is that, during this time, the paper expanded from a four-page paper to an eight-page one, leaving more room to be filled with local news and more sensationalist stories, rather than only stories of national significance. Another significant reason is that the newspaper shifted away from political content towards a more holistic range of topics around the same time. Under editor Marion Butler, the newspaper transformed from a political organ to a widely-selling and prosperous paper, and part of that was due to embracing human-interest stories. The paper gained a women’s page, regularly ran poems, speeches, and crime reporting in order to draw in a broad readership.
The tone of the articles themselves did not change noticeably over time. Throughout the time period of the dataset, the articles tended to have an informative but somewhat editorialized tone, with alleged criminals being described as “brutish” (especially if they were non-white) and the perpetrators of "outrages," while the women who forcibly defended their chastity were lauded. The newspaper did, however, attempt to maintain respectability, not taking on the tone of a lurid tabloid.