Editors’ Introduction: Sensationalism’s Enduring Power

Amanda Frisken is Professor of American Studies at Old Westbury College, State University of New York. Her book, Graphic News: How Sensational Images Transformed Nineteenth Century Journalism (2020) examines how the introduction of news images to daily newspapers after the Civil War reshaped media production. Frisken is coeditor, with Lisa Arellano and Erica Ball, of a special issue of Radical History Review titled “Reconsidering Gender, Violence, and the State.” Her first book, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth Century America (2004, reprinted in 2011) explores Woodhull’s transgressive impact on 1870s US cultural politics.

Gretchen Soderlund is Associate Professor of Media History in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Her book, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (2013), demonstrates that controversies over gender, race, and sexuality were at the heart of fin-de-siècle debates over sensationalism and objectivity. Soderlund is editor of a special issue of Social Semiotics titled “Charting, Tracking, Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance.” She has published articles on the history of investigative journalism; sensationalism and objectivity in news; antivice movements and the press; and conspiracy narratives in popular culture.