Campaigns of Curiosity

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world.

Campaigns of Curiosity chronicles American journalist Elizabeth Banks’s bold entry into London’s rigid class system at the height of the Victorian era. Determined to make her name, Banks went undercover as a housemaid, laundress, flower girl, and heiress, bringing sharp wit and keen observation to her exposés of working-class life and the role of women in British society.

First published in 1894, Campaigns of Curiosity marks a pivotal moment in the rise of investigative journalism, a form pioneered and shaped by women using ingenuity and audacity to break new ground. Following Nellie Bly’s trail, Banks showed that ＂stunt＂ reporting could achieve both literary merit and lasting social insight.

With a new introduction by longtime correspondent Brooke Kroeger, this edition restores a forgotten pioneer to her rightful place in journalism’s history.

The complete Forerunners series:

• Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks; with an introduction by Brooke Kroeger
• Cuba in War Time, by Richard Harding Davis; with an introduction by Peter Maas
• Race Adjustment, by Kelly Miller; with an introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway
• Drift and Mastery, by Walter Lippmann; with an introduction by Nicholas Lemann