Overview
The term dime novels refer to short stories that were a dominant part of U.S. popular culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The novels were popular for their price of around 10 cents and targeted primarily the young, working class population. Detective stories were just one popular dime novel genre – others include western, adventure, sports, military, and romance tales. The USF Libraries Special Collections division houses one of the largest dime novel collections in the country, and our study will analyze just one series within the detective novels in USF’s extensive collection. The purpose of our study is to analyze the societal and cultural influences throughout the publication period of the Nick Carter detective series. Our analysis focuses on the Nick Carter series because its series endured for over 20 years, a significant length of time for many dime novel series. We will be presenting our findings through an open-source web developing software called Omeka. This multi-page website will provide downloadable digitized editions of several Nick Carter dime novels from representative years of the series long publication run, in addition to plot analyses, and brief reviews of the scholarly literature on the genre of the detective dime novel. Because little research exists on the subject of dime novels, we wish to offer an insight into how these dime novels reflected and shaped the socio-cultural milieu of the late 19th and early 20th century America. Published during a time of rapid industrialization and a huge influx of immigration, this neglected popular cultural form reveals a significant amount about prevailing contemporaneous attitudes towards race, class, and gender in American culture.