ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the attitudes and worldviews of nineteenth-century journalists as they delivered this blizzard of death to the public. Large, mass-circulation newspapers, such as the New York Sun and Herald, began to appear in 1830s. To provide background, a small selection of newspapers from 1800 to 1830 was examined, as well as a variety of Puritan sermons and writings from approximately 1650 to 1800, in which the writers addressed some recent fatal event. This range provides a fairly lengthy period of time for looking at sensationalism in American journalism. The accounts of death in newspapers in the early nineteenth century often reflected the religious beliefs and reactions toward the end of life held by the Puritans more than century earlier. The manner of a person's death was often presumed to reflect upon his character. Reporters often used the language and conventions of an earlier era when describing death, even those who probably did not have a Christian world-view.
