Theft in the Daily Dispatch & Richmond Dispatch, 1900 & 1920

Welcome to the project on theft in the Daily Dispatch and the Richmond Dispatch! In this project, theft was researched in the Daily Dispatch and the Richmond Dispatch and to understand theft in these papers it must be first understood why two papers are listed instead of the usual one paper. 

Firstly of note, the Daily Dispatch (1850-1884) is the original paper and the Richmond Dispatch (1884-1903) is a continuation of the Daily Dispatch under a new name. It would then be bought out by Joseph Bryan, publisher of The Times, in which the papers would be combined into the Times-Dispatch. The Times-Dispatch will not be covered as it is an entirely different newspaper under a new publisher.

Secondly of note, the Daily Dispatch and the Richmond Dispatch, while written by different people, had a similar written perspective on Richmond and Virginia's place in the United States. The Daily Dispatch would be written initially by James A. Cowardin who was pro-slavery and so within time as the writer of the paper his views became a lot more apparent. After Cowardin suffered a stroke in 1879, Charles O' Brien who was his son, became the writer and the writing stayed the same in terms of views for a bit, but during the later stages of the paper, the views would start to recede in appearance and the paper would focus on being a high quality source of news rather than a political propaganda paper. As of reading the stories between 1880 and 1903 I am inclined to believe this statement of political recession in the paper.

Thirdly of note, A total of forty stories of theft were searched from the paper for this analysis, twenty from 1880-1884 and twenty from 1900-1903, which make up the data to be analyzed.  The search term that was chosen for the research was theft, which served as a very common term in the paper for refering to acts of . . . well theft naturally.  The search of theft is a bit strange as theft as a term can mean an assortment of crimes in terms of severity.  Theft is not exclusive to big value items and its it can be done a numerous amount of times. Searching "theft" in the paper is not a matter of looking for the possibility of theft occurring, rather its looking for what made theft interesting enough to be put in the paper by an editor.

As a side note information regarding the backround of the paper has been taken from the about page for the Daily Dispatch on the Library of Congress' website titled Chronicling America (https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84024738/). Furthermore aditional information can be found on the Richmond Dispatch on the about page for the Richmond Dispatch on the same site (https://www.loc.gov/item/sn85038614/), although there is not much that differs between the pages as they cover the start of the Daily Dispatch to the buying out of the Richmond Dispatch, the page for the Richmond Dispatch has some minor changes in its introduction segment.