Based on an analysis of episodic crime reporting in the New York Herald and
the New York Sun of the 1830s, the following article examines the
intersections of gender, race, and class in the origins of modern crime news. The
role played by intersections among race, gender, and class in US crime news has not
always been transparent or straightforward. In the ideologically charged context of
crime news, for example, codes for representing black masculinity as criminal grew
out of early 19th-century conceptualizations of gender, race, and class that were
fundamentally racist and misogynist. Re-examining the early development of US crime
news through a lens that encompasses race, gender, and class can tell us much about
how various forms of threat construction came to be, as well as shedding light on
the hold these forms of threat construction continue to exercise within US crime
news and public discourses about crime.
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