In a time of uncertainty and change in the newspaper industry, this book provides a concise and thorough overview of the field, looking back at newspapers' history, and forward to their future - and insisting there will be one. The authors, former journalists who now teach the subject, review the practices of the profession - from defining news to examining who owns newspapers, from newspaper readership to the new media environment. Written in an accessible style, this comprehensive text is well suited for a range of courses on newspapers.
This volume profiles 60 American journalists from colonial times to the present and focuses on news reporters, editors, publishers, and broadcasters whose careers significantly advanced or were symbolic of major changes in their profession. Illustrations, fact boxes, and quotations from the subjects themselves, together with the depth and breadth of historical information, make this volume an illuminating and fascinating read.
Explores the sibling rivalry that emerged in the American literary marketplace in the decades after the advent of the penny press, showing how journalism became a target, a counterpoint, and even a model for numerous American authors, including Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, and Stowe.
In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act--and especially her death--into one of the first media spectacles in American history. In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death, and always--if obliquely--at themselves. At the same time, he reveals how deeply an obsession with race penetrated different facets of American life, from public memory to private fantasy. Concluding the book is a piece of historical detective work in which Reiss attempts to solve the puzzle of Heth's real identity before she met Barnum. His search yields a tantalizing connection between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her master.
The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War reveals the critical role of journalism in the years leading up to America’s deadliest conflict by exploring the events that foreshadowed and, in some ways, contributed directly to the outbreak of war. This collection of scholarly essays traces how the national press influenced and shaped America’s path towards warfare. Major challenges faced by American newspapers prior to secession and war are explored, including: the economic development of the press; technology and its influence on the press; major editors and reporters (North and South) and the role of partisanship; and the central debate over slavery in the future of an expanding nation. A clear narrative of institutional, political, and cultural tensions between 1820 and 1861 is presented through the contributors’ use of primary sources. In this way, the reader is offered contemporary perspectives that provide unique insights into which local or national issues were pivotal to the writers whose words informed and influenced the people of the time. As a scholarly work written by educators, this volume is an essential text for both upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates who study the American Civil War, journalism, print and media culture, and mass communication history.
The influence of the mass media on American history has been overwhelming. History of the Mass Media in the United States examines the ways in which the media both affects, and is affected by, U.S. society. From 1690, when the first American newspaper was founded, to 1995, this encyclopedia covers more than 300 years of mass media history. History of Mass Media in the United States contains more than 475 alphabetically arranged entries covering subjects ranging from key areas of newspaper history to broader topics such as media coverage of wars, major conflicts over press freedom, court cases and legislation, and the concerns and representation of ethnic and special interest groups. The editor and the 200 scholarly contributors to this work have taken particular care to examine the technological, legal, legislative, economic, and political developments that have affected the American media.
An annotated bibliography on women who wrote fiction in the US during the period 1790-1870. The first part is an annotated list of sources that discuss women's fiction in the period and women authors born before 1840 who published before 1870. The second part is an alphabetical list of the approximately 325 19th century writers who meet those criteria. There are indexes by pseudonym, editor, and subject. The sources provide information not only about the individual authors but also about the history of criticism and literary politics, especially women's place in the American literary canon.
"Lincoln's Censor examines the effect of government suppression on the Democratic press in Indiana during the spring of 1863. Indiana's Democratic newspaper editors were subject to Milo S. Hascall's General Order Number Nine, which proclaimed that all newspaper editors and public speakers that encouraged resistance to the draft or any other war measure would be treated as traitors. Brigadier General Hascall, commander of the District of Indiana, was amplifying General Order Number Thirty-eight of Major General Ambrose Everts Burnside, the commander of the Department of the Ohio. Burnside's order declared that criticism of the president and the war effort was tantamount to "declaring sympathies with the enemy." Eleven Democratic newspapers in Indiana faced suspension." "The author found that Democratic newspapers in majority Republican counties were more likely to face suppression, even if constraints on the Democratic press were more necessary in majority Democratic counties. The study concludes that while a temporary chilling effect occurred in Indiana, the free-press tradition survived in the long run."--BOOK JACKET.
Whether the issue is the rise of religiously inspired terrorism, the importance of faith based NGOs in global relief and development, or campaigning for evangelical voters in the U.S., religion proliferates in our newspapers and magazines, on our radios and televisions, on our computer screens and, increasingly, our mobile devices. Americans who assumed society was becoming more and more secular have been surprised by religions' rising visibility and central role in current events. Yet this is hardly new: the history of American journalism has deep religious roots, and religion has long been part of the news mix. Providing a wide-ranging examination of how religion interacts with the news by applying the insights of history, sociology, and cultural studies to an analysis of media, faith, and the points at which they meet, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media is the go-to volume for both secular and religious journalists and journalism educators, scholars in media studies, journalism studies, religious studies, and American studies. Divided into five sections, this handbook explores the historical relationship between religion and journalism in the USA, how religion is covered in different media, how different religions are reported on, the main narratives of religion coverage, and the religious press.
