Abstract
During the 1850s, undercover journalists broke new ground by covering slave auctions, Northern uprisings, and fraud. In 1857, Mortimer Thomson, a comedic writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went undercover. For the series, “The Witches of New York,” he visited New York fortune tellers who advertised regularly in the newspapers. They sold tonics, offered to find stolen property, helped with matchmaking, and claimed they could tell the future. The series also took the reader to the seedier parts of Lower Manhattan to debunk tricksters and frauds. Later, his works were chronicled in a book, The Witches of New York. His work predates the turn of the twentieth century “stunt journalists” such as Nellie Bly, who wrote first-person narratives about their adventures to actively expose social injustice.
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