Volume 1, No. 1, Spring 1974
Reel, Guy. “Richard Fox, John L. Sullivan, and the Rise of Modern American Prize Fighting.” 73-85
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- Sumpter, Randall S. “News About News: John G. Speed and the First Newspaper Content Analysis.” 64-72.
- Tucher, Andie. “In Search of Jenkins: Taste, Style, and Credibility in Gilded-Age Journalism.” 50-55.
- Volume 27, No. 3, Fall 2001 Anderson, William B. “Saving the National Pastime’s Image: Crisis Management During the 1919 Black Sox Scandal.” 105-111.
- Collins, Ross F. “The Business of Journalism in Provincial France During World War I.” 112 -121.
- Fosdick, Scott. “Chicago Newspaper Theater Critics of the Early Twentieth Century.” 122-128.
- Johansen, Peter. “‘For Better Higher and Nobler Things’: Massey’s Pioneering Employee Publication.” 94-104.
- Twomey, Jane L. “May Craig: Journalist and Liberal Feminist.” 129-138.
- Volume 27, No. 4, Winter 2001-2002 Block, Sharon. “Rape and Race in Colonial Newspapers, 1728-1776.” 146-155.
- Daniel, Douglas K. “Ohio Newspapers and the ‘Whispering Campaign’ of the 1920 Presidential Election.” 156-164.
- Evensen, Bruce J. “‘Saucepan Journalism’ in an Age of Indifference: Moody, Beecher and Brooklyn’s Gilded Press.” 165-177.
- Warner, Jessica, and Frank Ivis. “On the Vanguard of the First Drug Scare: Newspapers and Gin in London, 1736-1751.” 178-187.
- Volume 28, No. 1, Spring 2002 Bradshaw, Katherine A. “The Misunderstood Public Opinion of James Bryce.” 16-25.
- Griffin-Foley, Bridget. “‘The Crumbs are Better than a Feast Elsewhere’: Australian Journalists on Fleet Street.” 26-37.
- Henry, Susan. “Ruth Hale: ‘A Passionate Contender’ Caught in a ‘Curious Collaboration.’” 2-15.
- Hume, Janice. “Saloon-Smashing Fanatic, Corn-Fed Joan of Arc: The Changing Memory of Carry Nation in Twentieth-Century American Magazines.” 38-47.
- Volume 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 Henry, Susan. “Tom Reilly (1935-2002).” 55.
- Perry Jr., Earnest L. “It’s Time to Force a Change: The African-American Press’ Campaign for True Democracy during World War II.” 85-95.
- Smythe, Ted Curtis. “The Diffusion of the Urban Daily, 1850-1900.” 73-84.
- Streitmatter, Rodger, and John C. Watson. “Herman Lynn Womack: Pornographer as First Amendment Pioneer.” 56-65.
- Williams, Julian. “Percy Greene and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.” 66-72.
- Volume 28, No. 3, Fall 2002 Farnsworth, Stephen J. “Seeing Red: The FBI and Edgar Snow.” 137-145.
- Flamiano, Dolores. “The (Nearly) Naked Truth: Gender, Race, and Nudity in Life , 1937.” 121-136.
- Lomicky, Carol S. “Frontier Feminism and the Woman ’ s Tribune : The Journalism of Clara Bewick Colby.” 102-111.
- Pinzon, Charles. “The Kid in Upper 4: How Nelson Metcalf, Jr., Sold Support of the Soldier Next Door to a Disgruntled Public during World War II.” 112-120.
Reel, Guy. “Richard Fox, John L. Sullivan, and the Rise of Modern American Prize Fighting.” 73-85. During the 1880s, National Police Gazette publisher Richard Kyle Fox helped create modern boxing by conducting promotions, offering prize belts, and publicizing the exploits of boxing great John L. Sullivan. Fox used the Gazette not just to chronicle the adventures of buxom showgirls or to sensationalize the latest heinous crime; it also was a pulpit to denounce hypocrites who opposed the modern sport of boxing. Through his tenacity, and good fortune in having the deeps of a legend such as Sullivan to play up, Fox became one of the most influential sports figures of the nineteenth century; and it made him a millionaire. Sullivan was just as fortunate, becoming world famous. This article tells the story of Fox, Sullivan, and the National Police Gazette during part of Fox’s lengthy tenure as editor and publisher. The Gazette, while it is perhaps best known for its emphasis on sex and crime as a precursor to today’s tabloid journalism, also should be remembered for its unrelenting, early support of professional prize fighting.
This article examines the history of the first quantitative analysis of a newspaper. John Gilmer Speed, a former New York World editor, used this research method to compare the content of four New York dailies published in 1881 and in 1893. He concluded that “new journalism” had injected high levels of gossip and scandal into newspapers during the twelve-year interval. The new material adversely affected readers into two ways, he believed: It displaced useful news that readers needed to function in a democratic society, and it provided examples of poor behavior that readers might imitate. His study served as a foundation for later academic “muckrakers,” who used content analyses to critique newspapers’ interactions with other social institutions.
In the 1860s to the 1880s, the term “Jenkins,” borrowed from a British expression for a windy and obsequious society reporter, was widely used in the U.S. as a derisive term for journalists whose prose was over-rich and whose prying was viewed as excessive. Critics of the Jenkins tribe ran the gamut from Mark Twain to the august George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. A study of the use of the “Jenkins” label offers firm clues for evaluating how readers and reporters engaged with their newspapers. It reveals specific points of rivalry between reporters; it reflects a general public anxiety that was sometimes misplaced or even deliberately exaggerated over the evolving conventions of reportorial work; and it suggests that readers had a clear understanding about relationships between style and topic in journalistic prose, violations of which opened the offender to criticism. Volume 27, No. 3, Fall 2001
This article examines a previously unstudied aspect of the 1919 Black Sox scandal: how Major League Baseball executives’ desire to present the game as the national pastime, and the impact of the sporting press in helping to shape this image, influenced their crisis communications strategy, including appointing a commissioner and developing a press office. This study suggests the scandal’s impact on baseball’s image had more to do with the development of the baseball industry’s first press office than did economical factors; that is, baseball officials implemented a press office for ideological rather than functional reasons. Although organizations often suggest they institute public relations to present the industry’s voice in the marketplace of ideas, baseball industry leaders wanted to regain sportswriter approval and acquiescence in order to maintain the game’s status as the national pastime.
This article examines the difficulties of managing large newspapers as commercial enterprises during a world war by looking at two large French dailies in the south of that country during World War I as well as archival materials in Paris. The author describes staffing, paper supply, government control, and advertising revenues throughout this period. The conclusion is that war demands required French newspaper publishers and editors to make difficult choices, ultimately affecting the size and the cost of their publications. By 1918, the final year of the war, a powerful government-sponsored consortium was dictating most of the business decisions to the country’s publishers. Wartime difficulties eventually drove many French newspapers out of business, but the large dailies examined in this article survived.
In the early years of the twentieth century, when live theater dominated the entertainment world and print media led public discourse, each without competition from electronic forms, the daily newspaper theater critic mediated ideas and values quite differently than today’s critics, whose main function has been reduced to that of a consumer guide. This article examines the corps of theater critics who served ten Chicago newspapers about 100 years ago. At a time when news editors were reluctant to cover new ideas and social movements, such as the push for women’s suffrage, theater critics were encountering radical new social ideas from European playwrights. Whether they approved or disapproved—and they did both, vehemently—their open debate with each other provided a level of public conversation of incalculable value in their own time, and largely missing today.
In 1885, a Toronto-based agricultural implements maker, the Massey Manufacturing Co., inaugurated the Trip Hammer, which is widely believed to be the first true employee publication in North America. The magazine lasted one year and then the company’s management and the publication’s editors jointly agreed to end it because they felt there was an “absence of evidence” that it was meeting its goals and a lack of “outward marks of appreciation” for the “considerable labour expended.” Thus, it was viewed as a failure. This article sketches the company and its founding family, and describes the publication’s contents. It argues the monthly’s birth can be linked to personal and societal factors, but its content starkly reflected the employer’s moral and social values. Finally, the article examines why the company felt the publication was a failure despite substantial evidence that it was beneficial for the workers.
Washington political columnist May Craig was hardly known to readers outside of Maine, where her daily column was published for more than thirty years in a variety of state papers, including the Portland Press Herald. Yet this tiny woman, who titillated audiences and terrified guests on “Meet the Press,” was an ardent feminist who accomplished many “firsts” for female reporters at a time when the women’s rights movement was all but dead. Her most important accomplishment for women came when the “May Craig Amendment,” prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex, became federal law as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Volume 27, No. 4, Winter 2001-2002
This article uses scores of colonial newspaper reports of rape to examine the creation and perpetuation of racial ideologies in the early American press. Contrary to the historiographic emphasis on the nineteenth-century “myth of the black rapist,” this research shows that colonial newspapers reflected racial differences in the ways that they reported rapes. Reports of black-on-white rapes presented the attack as a racial crime, while white-on-white rapes emphasized the class, ethnic, or community identity of the individual attacker. Further, reports might identify victims of black rapists simply as white women or girls, while reports identified victims of white rapists as young and vulnerable or as the victims of particularly heinous attacks. Together, these patterns of reporting reified the connections between race and rape.
The 1920 campaign for president was a relatively quiet affair until a rumor about one of the candidates began to appear in print. Circulars produced by a college professor claimed that Sen. Warren G. Harding, the Republican nominee, had black ancestors, a scandalous charge in the early twentieth century. Only days before the election, the allegation began appearing in newspapers—but not all newspapers and not always in detail. This study examines how newspaper in Ohio, the home state of Harding and Democratic nominee James M. Cox (each of them newspaper publishers), responded to this major event late in the campaign. Press coverage reflected common attitudes about race and newspaper practices of the period.
This article analyses how the popular press in Gilded Age America helped to create a celebrity culture in religious reporting designed to stimulate circulation at a time of economic panic. Coverage of the era’s two leading evangelists, Henry Ward Beecher and D.L. Moody, by Brooklyn’s “saucepan press” demonstrated the entertainment value of religious news in modernizing America. Just as sauce contains many ingredients designed to tickle the palate, so, too, did modern newspaper reporting. Reeling from the Panic of 1873, it needed to be part news and part entertainment if it was to find and keep an audience. Beecher’s adultery trial and Moody’s trans-Atlantic revival success had made each a star by the fall of 1875, when they filled the pages of Brooklyn’s press with tall tales designed to titillate and excite readers, who had wearied of traditional religious reporting. If Moody’s mass meetings showed that religion as a civic spectacle worked well, the Beecher story showed that religion as a civic scandal worked equally well.
This article examines how newspapers portrayed cheap distilled spirits, known as gin, and the people who drank it in eighteenth-century London. It shows that coverage did not coincide with movements in consumption; rather, coverage peeked with the passage of the Gin Act of 1736 and then declined and disappeared altogether just as consumption reached new heights in the early 1740s. Coverage then resumed in January 1751, by which time consumption was already in decline. Despite the fact that coverage and consumption did not move in tandem, there is little evidence to suggest that newspapers contributed to the making of a moral panic over gin and its supposed effects on the health, morals, and productivity of the working poor. In the 1730s, at least, newspapers were divided on the subject of gin; in the early 1750s, by contrast, the press was unanimous in its condemnation of gin, but, as in the 1730s, it generally avoided running sensational stories. Volume 28, No. 1, Spring 2002
Public opinion polls have appeared in newspapers since the 1930s, and George Gallup relied on the thinking of James Bryce to link such polling to democracy. However, using Bryce’s work to make this link demonstrates a misunderstanding of it. While Gallup argued that common men were wise, Bryce argued that men were stratified by race and ordered by rank in their ability to reason and govern. Thus, he advocated extending the influence of an elite few to the masses in order to moderate the dangers of voting. He thought it a pity that so many of what he called the irrational, unreasoning “residuum” could vote. However, this may have been ignored by pollsters and social scientists because they were unaware of the historical arguments or may not have understood the subtlety of historical theory due to their foundational quantitative assumptions.
This article explores the experiences of Australian journalists who worked on Fleet Street in London between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II. Concentrating on a number of individual journalists, it considers the powerful lure of Fleet Street, the reasons for departure from Australia, first impressions of London, the opportunities provided by being abroad, experiences of success and failure on Fleet Street, working and social life, and the particular challenges and opportunities facing women journalists. It examines the theme of education in the public writings and private reflections of Australian journalists who worked on Fleet Street and reflects on the circularity and complexity of the imperial journalistic experience. While each journalist or editor would recount his or her one great exclusive, many would look back to the “golden age” of journalism before the crassness of Lord Northcliffe.
Ruth Hale was a journalist, feminist, activist, and unacknowledged collaborator with her husband, Heywood Brown, a prolific writer and extraordinarily popular newspaper columnist in the 1920s and 1930s. This article examines Hale’s successful journalism career before her marriage and its sharp decline afterwards, her essential role in the work for which Brown received sole credit and much acclaim, and the problematic marriage in which the couple’s journalistic partnership was imbedded. Also described is Hale’s social activism, including her fight for the right of women to keep their birth names after they married as a symbol of their equality with their husbands. It was a cause to which she was fiercely committed even as her crucial contribution to Brown’s work was obscured by his byline.
Early in the twentieth century, Carry Nation achieved celebrity status by smashing Kansas saloons with a hatchet. This made her something of an icon in American lore, remembered as a fierce crusader for temperance and women’s rights, yet almost as a cartoon caricature. Scholars have written about her crusades using press coverage as a primary source, but no one has examined, over time, public memory of this fascinating woman. This article traces magazine coverage of Nation throughout the twentieth century, showing how portrayals of “the bar room smasher” changed and what those changes revel about American culture and the American press. The purpose is to argue that these stories can be an important tool for studying cultural history. Volume 28, No. 2, Summer 2002
Tom Reilly, the founder of Journalism History, died on May 7 following a lengthy battle with prostate cancer. Susan Henry, who became a colleague of his at California State University-Northridge in 1976 and gradually worked more and more with the journal before becoming its next editor from 1985-91, was asked to write about his editorship and what it meant to historians in the journalism field. Her thoughts follow.
For the African-American press, proclaiming that there would be no “Close Ranks” during World War II was not enough. This article looks at how the African-American press, in conjunction with other civil rights organizations, used the dual victory campaign to bridge the gap between the African-American consciousness that wanted to continue the fight for equality during the war and the patriotic American consciousness that wished to wholeheartedly support the war effort. It explores how the African-American press responded to specific acts of discrimination and segregation that led to violence and apathy among African Americans. The discriminatory policies of the dominant culture heightened double-consciousness as espoused by W.E.B Du Bois and led the African-American press to adopt the principles of the Double V campaign as a way of helping African Americans cope with the duality of American democracy.
The daily newspaper penetrated American urban society in the last half of the nineteenth century to a much greater extent than historians have shown. They have misread that daily’s diffusion because they have used a circulation per capita calculation rather than a more realistic and appropriate circulation per urban household. This article provides a rationale for the new index and explains the changes in society, technology, and newspaper practices that made it possible for the industry to sell 2.61 copies per urban dwelling in 1900, the highest diffusion ever attained in either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Even in the antebellum period there was a far greater diffusion than was thought, with 1.5 copies per urban dwelling in 1850. The study also suggests the significance of this hidden diffusion to society and to the newspaper industry.
Although media historians have broadly chronicled the struggle for press freedom in the United States, they have done little to document the lives and contributions of pornographers. This article seeks to begin filling that void by illuminating the life, work, and First Amendment struggles of Herman Lynn Womack, a publisher who specialized in materials designed to titillate and appeal to gay men. His battles against the efforts of the U.S. Post Office to halt the circulation of his publications are chronicled, and the social and legal ramifications of his ultimate victory in a landmark 1962 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court are examined. The ruling in Manual Enterprises Inc. v. J Edward Day expanded the limits of First Amendment protection and began erasing the social stigma imposed on homosexuality.
This article focuses on the relationship between Percy Green, the black editor of the Jackson Advocate, and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission from 1956 to 1965. He was a paid informant of the commission, which was a state-funded segregationist organization that secretly gathered information on individuals who supported the civil rights movement. An examination of commission files reveals that it considered Green, a conservative, to be an important contact person, and he was relied upon heavily to help the agency carry out its mission. This study provides insight into what motivated him to work for the commission and what activities he was involved in as an agent. It concludes that the relationship between Greene and the commission grew more complex as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s. Volume 28, No. 3, Fall 2002
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s study of the politics of Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China, was marked by inaccuracies and by incomplete analysis. The bureau’s reports on him, when compared to his writings, demonstrate that the government created a misleading portrait of the prominent journalist. The bureau’s use of his alleged memberships in liberal groups to claim guilt by association likewise showed an FBI pattern of errors and incomplete evidence. Even some of the basic biographical information that the bureau collected on him was incorrect. The irresponsible research on Snow was used to discredit the journalist in the New York Times and resulted in the U.S. government banning his work from government-sponsored libraries abroad and in congressional loyalty hearings during the 1950s. The resulting scandals effectively ended his journalistic career in the U.S., even though he was never found to be disloyal to his native country.
Henry Luce’s Life magazine had an early brush with controversy in 1937 with the publication of a voyeuristic feature titled, “How to Undress.” This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of this and other instances of nudity in the first year of Life to understand the institutional and cultural context in which “How to Undress” emerged. It also addresses the questions of how this feature (and nudity more broadly) fit into photojournalism and what these images and responses to them suggest about ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality. Life’s nudity was not merely a frivolous distraction from the serious news of the day, as some commentators have suggested. Instead, it often communicated serious messages about women’s proper role in society and about distinctions between Americans and people from other cultures.
Clara Bewick Colby established the Woman’s Tribune in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1883. The suffragist newspaper survived twenty-six years and would later include Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, as places of publication. This study is an analysis of the content of the newspaper in the years when it was published in Nebraska (1883-89), during which time the paper provided rural, isolated women with information that transcended the right to vote. The study concludes that the Women’s Tribune consistently was framed within an identifiable feminist ideology, in which Colby held to the notion that suffrage and equality for women were moral rights in a democratic society.
“The Kid in Upper 4,” an advertisement created for the New Haven Railroad during the early part of World War II by copywriter Nelson C. Metcalf, Jr., has been called “the most famous advertisement of the war and one of the most effective of all time” by historian Frank W. Fox. James Twitchell labeled it as the beginning of advocacy advertising and as one of the twenty advertisements that “shook the world.” Drawing on interviews with Metcalf and other sources, the researchers detail the creation, context, and impact of a unique example of public affairs advertising. Download 482.26 Kb. Share with your friends:
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