| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 8.1

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| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 8.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews


Striking Chords: Murder and the Press in Virginia
TROTTI, MICHAEL AYERS. The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ix + 301 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3178-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5842-4.
Michael Ayers Trotti, an associate professor at Ithaca College, begins The Body in the Reservoir by defining "sensationalism" as "that subset of violent crimes that struck a chord in the community" (5). Considerable work has been done by scholars looking at spectacular crimes in New England and elsewhere, but Trotti shows that Virginians charted their own course. This regional distinctiveness serves to highlight the limits of Trotti's definition. Virginia editors came to crime reporting more reluctantly than did their northern cousins, he tells us, and, as evidence, cites sensational slave uprisings such as Gabriel Prosser's, which generated not a single pamphlet or broadside. The newspapers contented themselves with readers' letters and the governor's proclamations. Yet the Prosser plot manifestly "struck a chord in the community," even if printers shed little ink over it. Despite his stated definition, Trotti actually argues by implication that true sensationalism occurred after cities and literacy rates expanded and printing improved. For Trotti, sensationalism, then, implicitly means those violent crimes that struck a chord among journalists. It would be interesting to know if the press led or followed public opinion, or failed to represent it at all. Trotti misses an opportunity to pursue those questions.	. . .

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