Word with a Past: Muckrakers

By Pamela | August 5, 2025 |

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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Richard Harding Davis: Journalist-Adventurer

By Pamela | July 22, 2025 |

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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Dorothy Fuldheim: An Exception to (All) The Rules

By Pamela | June 21, 2024 |

Women reporters faced a new kind of journalism after World War II. The long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio* was even more pronounced in the newly developing world of television—and would remain so for decades.** There is always an exception. Dorothy Fuldheim (1893-1989), a retired schoolteacher who was born the same year as Sigrid…

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