By: W. Joseph Campbell

The 2022-23 Joseph McKerns grant of $1,250 helped me gain momentum on an emergent research project that examines the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg from varying perspectives, including that of erroneous and exaggerated news reporting. My papers delivered at AJHA conferences in 2022 and 2023, respectively, addressed elements of this research. I was deeply honored that both received the David Sloan award for best faculty paper.

More specifically, the McKerns grant helped finance research trips from my home in suburban Washington, DC, to Columbia University in New York, where I examined a collection of papers of Peter Wellington Alexander, a leading Confederate reporter. Alexander's dispatches after the Battle of Gettysburg figure prominently in the emergent project. In fact, my 2022 AJHA paper, “Proto-pack Journalism in Gettysburg’s Aftermath: Parsing the Extravagant Claims of the Confederacy’s ‘Greatest’ War Correspondent,” focused on Alexander's erroneous reporting. The paper also won the AJHA Eberhard award.

In addition, the McKerns grant helped cover expenses related to my separate trip to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Historical Society, which has an extensive collection of the papers of George Gordon Meade, commander of the Federal Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg and afterward. The image below shows a letter that Meade wrote in 1864. The Meade papers were useful, primary-source material for my 2023 AJHA paper, which debunked the notion that Northern war correspondents organized and pursued a news boycott of Meade after he ordered the humiliation and expulsion of a Philadelphia Inquirer journalist who reporting angered the general. The paper, “Interrogating A Conspiracy: About That Civil War Press Boycott of General Meade,” also won the Eberhard award.

Additionally, the grant was helpful in covering local transportation costs related to a visit to the Library of Congress, where I examined microfilm holdings of Civil War era newspapers, some content of which was incorporated in the  “Interrogating A Conspiracy" paper.

Kate Dunsmore is professor emeritus in the Department of Communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her current research examines American Revolutionary era newspaper production with a focus on what timeliness meant to eighteenth century readers.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

I think I learned about AJHA first at the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, about 12 years ago. I really enjoy the AJHA conferences; people are nice and always have interesting things to talk about.

How did you develop your interest in journalism or media history?

It started with my dissertation, which analyzed the role of the press in the US-Canada alliance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I noticed some frames being taken up with great vigor, more than seemed justifiable by the current event. An example was the “terror haven” framing of Canada following the 9/11 terror attack. That got me thinking about how deeply engrained was the framing of Canada as a suspect haven. Before long, I was back to the era of the American Revolution. So, I am starting there.

What makes you most excited about teaching or research?

I’m now Professor Emeritus, so not really teaching anymore. What I found most exciting was seeing students who might be struggling—perhaps because they were first in their families to attend college—then find their footing.

I’m very excited to have the time for research now. My teaching and service load was quite heavy, but I retain full library privileges and am burning up the online databases and interlibrary loan. I take an inductive approach to research, so it's exciting not to know how things will transpire. For example, currently I am looking at references to timeliness in Revolutionary era newspapers. But, then, I felt the need to know about conceptions of time in the prior century or two. Reading about the early modern personal letters sent, copied and distributed, I realized that expectations of timeliness of newsletters shifted with respect to newspapers and possibly shift again in America in the Revolutionary era.

What question(s) do you wish fellow researchers or colleagues would ask about your work?

I’ve never worried about that! The communication and journalism history community has been very welcoming. I’m glad to see the conversation about interdisciplinary approaches to communication and journalism history. Social phenomena are complex. I’m confident that tools such as discourse analysis are helpful in accurately analyzing the past.

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

I’m converting what was suburban lawn into native perennial gardens. So far, so good! I also now have time to attempt more challenging work in textile arts, including garment design.

By: Erin Coyle

I fondly recall Professor Michael S. Sweeney auctioning off items during the first American Journalism Historians Association Convention that I attended. He kindly coaxed friends to bid on books, memorabilia, and an AJHA hoodie to support graduate student travel to the conference.

The tradition of providing this financial assistance exemplifies AJHA goals to foster the advancement of research and to build connections among journalism historians. The organization briefly shifted to collecting monetary donations to raise travel funding for students. After receiving a monetary donation from the Sweeney family as a seedling for Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipends, the organization resumed holding auctions to support student participation in annual conferences and build connections among members in 2022.

For the past two years, members have donated books, art, and other items. Proceeds have paid for Sweeney stipends. Students who have presented at an annual convention, attended most convention sessions, and volunteered during the convention have received these awards.

“As a broke graduate student, receiving financial aid to attend the annual conference has helped me in more ways than I can mention,” Claire Rounkles wrote in an email.

Rounkles, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri and an assistant professor at The University of Memphis, has participated in coordinating auctions since 2022. These efforts provided valuable opportunities for her to interact with students and faculty during annual conventions.

Eric Boll, an Ohio University graduate student who received Sweeney stipends in 2022 and 2023, described AJHA conventions as welcoming and accessible. Receiving support to attend the 2022 convention meant so much to Boll that he asked Bob Woodward to autograph a book that Boll and Ohio University Professor Aimee Edmondson donated for the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association auction.

“I could not have gone to any of the AJHAs without the assistance of the Sweeney fund,” Boll said.

Raja Das, an Ohio University graduate student who received a 2023 Sweeney Travel Stipend, indicated that such funding is important for international students to be able to attend conferences.

“I am glad that the Sweeney Fund Award also ensures that we can be among diverse communities and secure us a home away from home," Das wrote.

The 2023 auction raised $2,758, and six students received Sweeney stipends. The auction committee hopes to raise $3,000 in 2024 to provide more support for graduate students.

Seventeen members donated 66 items for the 2023 auction. Members wishing to donate items for the 2024 auction should submit information about each item before September 20. You can bid on items during  the week of the conference.  Donated items must be brought to the conference hotel in Pittsburgh, Pa. Recipients of items must bring their items home from the conference.

“The auction is an important way that AJHA can support and encourage our new generation of brilliant media history scholars,” said Jon Marshall, who chairs the auction committee. “It’s also a fun way for people to interact during the conference and win some cool things.”

Erin Coyle is an associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Temple University Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, an affiliate Professor of Law in the Temple University Beasley School of Law, and member of the AJHA Board of Directors and the AJHA Auction Committee.

By: Melissa Greene-Blye

It is with pleasure and gratitude that I share an update on a research project made possible by support from the American Journalism Historians Association via a Joseph McKerns Research Grant awarded in July of 2022. 

The grant funding made it possible for me to visit the Sequoyah National Research Center (SNRC) housed at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. During my three-day visit, I had the privilege of talking with SNRC Director Daniel Littlefield, Ph.D. and Erin Fehr, Assistant Director and Archivist, both of whom were generous in sharing their time, expertise, and knowledge of the materials housed in the archive. 

For those not familiar with SNRC, its self-stated mission, paraphrased here, is to acquire and preserve the writings and ideas of Native North Americans, through collecting the written word and art of Native Americans and creating a research atmosphere that invites Indigenous peoples to make SRNC an archival home for their creative work. SNRC’s collection includes artistic expression, literature, photography, as well as historical and contemporary Indigenous newspapers and journalistic work product. 

For my purposes, I went with the intent of finding copies of student-produced newsletters and newspapers from residential boarding schools, places where Native children were forced to give up their traditional languages, cultures and beliefs and, instead, adopt non-Native ways of speaking and behaving. I wanted to find out what, specifically, these publications contained in the way of student-generated content. What were these students talking about and, perhaps more importantly, what weren’t they talking about?

My interest in this topic began with the mention of a single newsletter produced by young Cherokee women who attended a church-sponsored residential school in the territory where that tribe, like so many others, had been forcibly relocated. So, it was with great excitement that I learned SNRC had some copies of this newsletter in the archives, and it was that information that prompted my plans to visit.  

It truly was a journey into the past as I had to rely on microfilm to view the archival materials I sought to examine, but thanks to today’s technology, I had scanned copies of those newsletters in my email inbox before I left at the end of my first day. Sadly, there were only two copies of the Cherokee student newsletter in the archives, likely other copies were destroyed in a fire at the seminary school in 1887. This gave me pause to rethink the focus of my intended research, particularly as this research was taking place only months after the discovery of mass graves on the sites of several of these schools was making international headlines alongside calls for justice for those children, their descendants, and the tribal communities those children came from. I am now broadening the scope of this research to re-examine “captivity narratives” using Indigenous Standpoint Theory to go beyond the words on the page, to provide a broader context for how these students’ words were controlled and edited to support the assimilationist mission of these schools.  

Traditional captivity narratives tell the stories of the experiences of White persons who were taken captive by Native tribes, often in ways intended to reinforce negative images of those tribes. The words of these Native students, contained in residential school newsletters and newspapers, flip that narrative, making the Native student the captive; this research project seeks to examine that role reversal and cast new light on how we define “captivity” narratives. 

The funds provided through this grant were crucial in taking the first step to elevate the voices and experiences of these students while also supporting a project that will serve to educate non-Native readers and scholars about a watershed moment in our history as Indigenous people, while simultaneously telling an important, and overlooked, part of our media history.

Melissa Greene-Blye is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and an affiliate faculty in Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas. She is also a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Her research explores representations of American Indian identity in journalism.

Wayne Dawkins' latest project covers the lives of two sports journalists, Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith, and how their reporting in Baltimore's Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier, respectively, pushed for desegregation in baseball in the 1930s and 1940s. Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith: The Dynamic Duo That Desegregated American Sports, the latest entry in Routledge's Historical Americans series, is available on July 17 and can be purchased directly from Routledge for a 20 percent discount using code AFLY02.

Wayne Dawkins is a professor of practice in multimedia journalism at Morgan State University. Before joining academia, Dawkins worked at newspapers throughout the Northeast and Midwest.

By: Julie Lane

The Public Relations Committee has developed a social media plan to facilitate member engagement and to raise AJHA’s public profile. Help us share with the world what you and your fellow journalism historians do. Here are a few ways you can do that:

• Follow AJHA on our new Instagram account (AJHAsocial) and our X/Twitter account (@AJHAsocial) if you are on either platform. Encourage colleagues and other interested people to follow us as well.

• Tag us on relevant Instagram posts and tweets you make from your personal accounts.

• Respond to prompts we post on Instagram and X/Twitter about your memories of AJHA conventions, recent journalism history articles you’ve read, your work in archives, etc.

• Suggest journalists, museums, libraries, and other related organizations for us to follow. Email your suggestions to julielane@boisestate.edu.

Thank you for your help as we work to enhance the AJHA public profile.

Meg Heckman is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media Innovation at Northeastern University. Her most recent book is a biography of newspaper publisher and leader in the twentieth century Republican party, Nackey Scripps Loeb (Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party, University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Heckman's current work examines health journalism written by women in the mid-twentieth century.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

I first learned about AJHA nearly a decade ago but didn’t get involved until the pandemic when I presented some research in progress at an excellent virtual conference. It was such a great way to connect with new colleagues during an otherwise difficult time.

How does your professional experience as a journalist inform your teaching and/or research?

I spent roughly a dozen years as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord Monitor, New Hampshire’s capital city newspaper. That experience helps me teach core skills such as interviewing, newswriting and editing, but my time in the newsroom also taught me how to lead teams, manage projects and communicate expectations—all things that are crucial to successful teaching!

What topics or questions are you pursuing in your current research?

I have a few projects in the works right now, but the big one involves documenting how women journalists in the 1940s and 1950s shaped the evolution health/medical journalism. Outside of media history, I’m also involved in various efforts to encourage institutions of higher education to do more to help rebuild the local news ecosystem.

What question(s) do you wish fellow researchers or colleagues would ask about your work and/or interests?

My fellow media historians tend to ask great questions and share great advice, but I would love more opportunities to discuss how digital tools are reshaping the research process and our understanding of media history.

What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of academia?

Staying active and getting outside as much as possible are key to my mental health. I also enjoy cooking and spending time with my family.

By: Natascha Toft Roelsgaard

The benefits of academic conferences are vast and many. They offer opportunities to build valuable connections with other scholars, discover emerging trends and topics in the field, and serve as a safe space to share and receive feedback on research projects—and who doesn’t love a chance to explore a new city?

Attending academic conferences is also an important stepping stone for graduate students, expanding their professional network, fine-tuning research ideas, and improving presentation skills. But attending can be costly. That’s why the AJHA auction, our annual fundraiser to support student travel, is so important. Last year, the auction, led by Jon Marshall, raised more than $2,700; this year, the committee hopes to raise $3,000.

All money raised helps fund the Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend, which supports students whose papers have been accepted by reducing the cost of attending the conference.

Claire Rounkles, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri and past stipend recipient, said that such financial support is vital for first-generation students like herself to attend. With the Sweeney Travel Stipend, Rounkles has attended several AJHA conferences, presented research papers and works in progress, and served on a panel.

“As a broke graduate student, receiving financial aid to attend the annual conference has helped me in more ways than I can mention. The opportunity the conference provides students to engage with scholars and to learn how to present is invaluable,” Rounkles said. “Besides the opportunity to advance my research, I have also fostered connections that have helped me in the job hunt. Any effort to continue the Sweeney Travel Stipend will help future scholars and advance the legacy Mike Sweeney held of promoting students to be the best they can be.”

To support student conference travel, you can donate an item or bid on one—or do both. Use this form to donate items or packages. It will ask you to briefly describe your item, upload a photo, and suggest a starting bid. Not sure what to donate? We are looking for historical books, magazines, newspapers, journalism history-related trinkets and tokens, such as coffee mugs, t-shirts, cameras, messenger bags, and glasses. Maybe you have a package of local goods or university merch you are willing to part ways with, and our members always get excited when wine and spirits are in the mix.

All donated items will be uploaded to Give Butter, which is the same app we used last year. While some items will be live auctioned during the conference, most bidding will happen on the app. So, keep your eyes peeled and bid early and often!

Natascha Toft Roelsgaard is an assistant professor of journalism at Muskingum University in Ohio. She serves on the AJHA Auction committee. 

By: Earnest Perry

In the 50^th anniversary edition of Journalism History, I discussed the importance of scholars participating in the peer review process. In the time since that article posted online, I have been asked to review two submitted articles and various conference papers. I must admit that I turned down a few. My administrative job and family obligations keep getting in the way. When former Intelligencer editor, Autumn Linford, asked me to address the issue in an issue of the newsletter, I said yes, but immediately thought, “what more could I say that would convince my fellow scholars to participate in the peer review process?”

I cannot stress enough how reviewing has helped me keep up with the latest research. I get excited when I read newly discovered material from archives that have not been explored or comments from oral histories that provide a unique perspective to historical events. I get the opportunity to engage with research that moves the scholarship forward, but also keeps me grounded in the present.

As a civil rights scholar, my goal has been to connect the complex history of the Black Press to the communities it served and the relationship it fostered with others fighting the long struggle. The more recent manuscripts I have reviewed challenged many of the conclusions I and other “seasoned” scholars have espoused in our careers. This is a good thing. It has provided me with ideas for future research and materials to be used in the classroom. This is not a benefit I saw coming from the peer review process, but I will gladly take it.

In the current environment where history is being challenged and, in some cases, restricted, it is comforting to see that the research continues. As a reviewer, I see the first drafts of scholarship that connects the past to the present. It also provides a glimpse into possible futures based on evidence, something that practitioners desperately need. Journalism educators spend a lot of time teaching the Who, What, When, Where and How, but the Why gets little attention. I see a lot of the Why in the manuscripts I review. It reminds me of the importance of what we do as history scholars and educators. As reviewers, we help strengthen the scholarship. It is another reason to participate in the peer review process.

Participating in the review process not only provides access to the latest research, but it can also lead to knowledge of the editorial process. I had the privilege of co-editing a special issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. That opportunity came about because of the relationship I forged with the journal editor and my co-editor as a manuscript reviewer and author. I learned a lot about the editorial process after the reviews are in. The experience has helped me to be a better reviewer and appreciate the work it takes to actually publish the research we produce.

As a young scholar, I initially focused more on why my work was not good enough “as is” than the advice provided to make it better. Conversations with the journal editors changed my perspective. It also led to me becoming a reviewer, serving on editorial boards, being elected to and serving as chair of both the research and publications committees of AEJMC. Being a reviewer has made me a better scholar, teacher and mentor. It has been one of the most beneficial service roles of my career.

Earnest L. Perry Jr., Ph.D. is Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at the Missouri School of Journalism.

By: Tom Mascaro

When Donald Trump supercharged his campaign against journalism, I immediately thought of Bill Porter’s class, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976). Porter was my professor at Michigan in the mid-1980s. I wrote to the press and suggested they reissue and update the book to address 21^st century threats to democracy.

I am happy to report that book is coming out this month (June 2024), and I’m honored to appear as Porter’s co-author. Porter, who died in 1999, was an old hand at covering the “awkward dance” of presidents and reporters. But he was adamant in his defense of journalism as an institution of democracy. Using that thesis, I revisited his book, analyzed his findings and concerns from a half century ago, added new history, and expanded the original “Documents of Significance” to include memos of Patrick Buchanan and H. R. Haldeman, primary sources revealing Nixon’s illegal mission to scuttle LBJ’s peace initiative in October 1968, the GOP’s plan to create a television network in the White House, and excerpts from academic papers and court cases. I curated Haldeman’s diary entries to reveal the gatekeeping, framing, and agenda setting practices of the Nixon administration, hoping to prod some new scholarship that pairs media studies with presidential/government studies employing the same theories.

Assault on the Media can be purchased from the University of Michigan Press website and the publisher is offering a 30% discount when code UMS24 is used at checkout. Exam copies or copies for media reviews are also available.

Tom Mascaro is professor emeritus in the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. He currently serves on the board of directors for the AJHA.