These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news--indeed to achieve star billing--and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.

Katrina J. Quinn is a professor of communication at Slippery Rock University. Named a Hazel Dicken-Garcia Distinguished Scholar of Journalism History in 2019, she has published on topics such as nineteenth-century political reporting, sensationalism, literary journalism, narrative, and personal accounts of the American frontier. Mary M. Cronin is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century press performance and legal issues. The author of three previous books and numerous scholarly journal articles, Cronin was a former reporter, copy editor, and assistant news editor in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Florida prior to her academic career. Lee Jolliffe is a professor of journalism at Drake University, where she teaches media design and honors courses on the media. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a freelance writer and as supervisor of the Writing and Editing Section at Battelle Institute on projects for NASA, DOE, DoD, NSF, NIH, and the EPA.

Table of Contents


Foreword

Michael S. Sweeney

Preface

Katrina J. Quinn

Introduction

Katrina J. Quinn, Lee Jolliffe and Mary M. Cronin

Part I: Adventures at Home

Adventure Reporting from America's Western Rails and Trails, 1860-1880

Katrina J. Quinn

From Gotham to the Golden Gate: Promoting American Expansion, Exceptionalism, and Nationhood by Railroad

Mary M. Cronin

"Into the Dark Abyss": Gilded Age Adventure Reporting from the Mines of America

Katrina J. Quinn

Float Along the Frontier: Down the Missouri with Captain Paul Boyton, James Creelman, and the New York Herald

Crompton Burton

"An Almost Undiscovered Country": Frank Leslie's 1890 Alaska Expedition and the Tradition of Gilded Age Adventure Journalism

Mary M. Cronin

Teresa Howard Dean: Reporting Tragedies and Triumphs from the American West

Paulette D. Kilmer

Part II: Globetrotters

Thomas Wallace Knox: A Celebrity Journalist's Travel and Adventure in Siberia and China

William E. Huntzicker

"Burning of the Clipper Ship Hornet at Sea" and Other Reports from Hawaii: Mark Twain's Adventure Reporting from the Sandwich Islands

Jennifer E. Moore

"The First Bold Adventure in the Cause of Humanity": Henry Morton Stanley's Adventure Journalism in Africa

James E. Mueller

To Better See the World: The Adventure Journalism of Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

James E. Mueller

"Mr. Bennett's Expedition": The New York Herald's Arctic Adventure

Crompton Burton

"Alive, but wiser from our experience": Nellie Bly's Adventure Reporting from Mexico and Around the World

Jack Breslin and Katrina J. Quinn

Afterword

Lee Jolliffe

Bibliography

About the Contributors

Index