Nineteenth Century America
Word with a Past: Muckrakers
While I was writing about Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), I started off thinking of her as a proto-muckraker, working a generation before people like Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946),* Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). But the closer I looked, the more I realized that the realism for which she was…
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Rebecca Harding Davis: Making Things Real
One of the joys of writing this blog is that when things are going well one post leads to another idea, another story, another question. It feels like my list of possible topics bubbles and fizzes* and I can hardly decide which story to tell you next.** This is one of the times when the…
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Richard Harding Davis: Journalist-Adventurer
I first ran across Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) when I was doing research on American foreign correspondents as part of the background for The Dragon from Chicago. He looked like a fascinating character, but he was a generation (or maybe even two generations) earlier than Sigrid Schultz, so I gave him a nod and went…
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