The AJHA presidency transferred to Mike Conway (left) from Aimee Edmondson on Oct. 1 at the AJHA convention in Memphis. (Photo courtesy of Erika Pribanic-Smith)

American Journalism Historians Association leadership is set for the 2022-2023 year, which will culminate in our 42nd annual convention in Columbus, Ohio, next September. 

Mike Conway (Indiana) has taken the gavel as AJHA president. Tracy Lucht (Iowa State) has ascended to first vice-president. Ken Ward (Pittsburg State) has taken over as treasurer. Erika Pribanic-Smith (Texas Arlington) continues as executive director.

Members of the AJHA have elected Debra van Tuyll (Augusta State, emerita) as second vice-president for 2022-2023; van Tuyll will then serve as first vice-president in 2023-2024 and president in 2024-2025.

Newly-elected board members serving three-year terms (2022-2025) are Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green, emeritus), Elisabeth Fondren (St. Johns), and Ashley Walter (Utah State). See the board page for the full Board of Directors, including continuing elected and ex-officio board members. 

Aimee Edmondson (Ohio) has completed her term as president and will serve as an ex-officio board member, leading the Long-Range Planning Committee. The board also has confirmed the following new committee chairs: Julie Lane (Boise State, Public Relations), Pete Smith (Mississippi State, Blanchard Prize), and Willie Tubbs (West Florida, Service Awards). See the committee page for the full list of committee chairs, including those who are continuing.

Autumn Linford (Auburn) is resuming her Intelligencer editor/ex-officio board member position after a year away to complete her PhD. Web Editor Christina Littlefield (Pepperdine) will be assisting with the email newsletter.

The AJHA thanks the following outgoing officers, board members, and committee chairs for their service:

• Candi Carter Olson (Membership Chair, Utah State)
• Dale Cressman (ACEJMC Representative, Brigham Young)
• Carolyn Edy (Treasurer, Appalachian State)
• Teri Finneman (Board, Kansas)
• Michael Fuhlhage (Board, Wayne State)
• Julien Gorbach (Public Relations Chair, Hawaiʻi Mānoa)
• Gwyn Mellinger (Board, James Madison)
• Tom Mascaro (Service Awards Chair; Bowling Green, emeritus)
• Erika Pribanic-Smith (Interim Intelligencer Editor; Texas Arlington)
• Rich Shumate (Web Editor, JJCHC Co-Coordinator; Central Arkansas)
• Kimberly Wilmot Voss (History in the Curriculum Chair, Central Florida)
• Dale Zacher (Blanchard Prize Chair, St. Cloud State)

The AJHA welcomes volunteers to assist with our committees and other initiatives. If you are interested in helping AJHA in the coming year, please contact First Vice-President Tracy Lucht.

Sid Bedingfield is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. Bedingfield entered academia after spending more than two decades as a professional journalist covering political contests in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965 (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and co-editor with Kathy Roberts Forde of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021).

When and how did you become involved in AJHA?

In 2008, a paper I wrote for Ken Campbell’s media history course at the University of South Carolina was accepted for presentation at AJHA’s conference in Seattle. I was allotted ten minutes on a panel moderated by Leonard Teel. At about the 12-minute mark, I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. Leonard was wind-milling his right arm like a third-base coach waving the runner home. I was encouraged to do a better job timing my presentations.

Your co-edited book with Kathy Roberts Forde, Journalism and Jim Crow, has won multiple awards—including the AJHA Book of the Year. What do you believe is the importance of this topic?

The book takes a fresh look at the rise of Jim Crow in the South by focusing on newspapers as institutions of power within their communities. It documents the role of the white press in building white supremacist political economies and social orders in the New South—and the critical role of the Black press in resisting those efforts. The publishers and editors who ran major white newspapers used the soft power of public discourse, but they exerted hard power, too. They were political actors who worked closely with other institutions of power—the Democratic Party, the railroads, mining companies, and other industries eager to take advantage of cheap labor in the emerging New South.

How does the book fit into your overall research agenda?

I began my research on journalism and its role in the nation’s racial politics when I joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina in 2007. My first book, Newspaper Wars, showed how the white, mainstream press had collaborated with politicians and business leaders to resist Black equality in the mid-twentieth century. Kathy saw the same thing in her initial research on Henry Flagler and his control of newspapers in Florida. That research launched the Journalism and Jim Crow project, but you can trace its roots to our many long conversations about journalism, race, and democracy during our years at USC.

How does your professional journalism experience informed your approach to media history?

During my time at CNN, I watched Roger Ailes build Fox News into a ratings juggernaut, and I saw how he worked closely with political and business allies to wield the network as a political weapon—an extremely effective political weapon.

How does your historical knowledge influence your teaching?

My research on journalism and democracy infuses all my media history courses, including a new one this semester where I’m taking students into the university’s special collections archive to conduct research in the papers of Hedley Donovan, editor-in-chief of Time, Inc, during the 1960s and '70s. This week, they are scouring Donovan’s papers for material on coverage of the Vietnam War.

What are you working on now?

In the short term, I’m working on multiple articles, including one on contemporary Black advocacy journalism, the mainstream press, and the public sphere. I also have launched a book project on Journalism in the Jim Crow North. Early days on that one.

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of academia?

My wife and I have three aging pets, and it sometimes feels like they dominate our spare time. But we spend most of our free time focusing on our grandkids—ages 8 and 5—and rooting on our daughter, who works in politics at this fraught moment in our nation’s history. Not for the faint of heart.

Lynn Hamer, professor in the UToledo Judith Herb College of Education, presents on Ohio HB 616 "Regarding Promoting and Teaching Divisive or Inherently Racist Concepts in Public Schools" at a 2022 UToledo Banned Books Week event.

By Paulette D. Kilmer, Professor and Coordinator of the UToledo Banned Books Week Vigil

For 25 years, we have joined the American Library Association in celebrating the right to read and think freely during Banned Books Week. We host an all-day program of 20-minute presentations to raise awareness of censorship. We give away door prizes, banned books, and light refreshments donated by sponsors. These gifts increase our web of involvement and make the Utoledo Banned Books Week Vigil a campus legacy event.

Sometimes, people ask us why it matters if books are banned since the Internet empowers people to buy whatever they want. Chilling incidents in 2021 threaten the future of our right to read freely. For example, in Virginia, a judge ended two lawsuits to force Barnes and Noble to require permission slips from parents and to remove forbidden books from the state.

Censorship episodes occurred all over the country. For example, in the spring of 2022, Idaho, Texas, and Oklahoma considered laws to fine, fire, or imprison librarians who did their job and refused to remove books some in the community considered offensive.

When my former student, Aya Khalil, found out that her award-winning picture book, The Arabic Quilt, a story about a Muslim girl, was banned in Pennsylvania, she wrote The Book-Banning Bake Sale, which will be released in 2023. The resistance she faced is part of an unfortunate national trend of restricting books about diverse groups and by people of color.

In another episode, two parents living near Cincinnati asked Milford Exemption Schools to remove Julia Alvarez’s book about two girls resisting a dictator in the Dominican Republic during the 1960s.

The American Library Association listed 1,597 individual book challenges or removals in the organization’s 2021 Field Guide, explaining that many challenged or banned books go unreported, and so the number of targeted books in 2021 was much greater. PEN America reported that 2 million students in 86 districts throughout the United States lost access to books through these restrictions. The percentage of challenges at public libraries rose to 37 percent.

In April of this year, The Washington Post reported that the principal at an elementary school north of Columbus, Ohio, told an author to read another book to students other than the popular It’s OK to Be a Unicorn. The unicorns and rainbow lettering on Jason Tharp’s book convinced one parent it would recruit students to be gay. Actually, the protagonist, Cornelius, hides his true self from his horse neighbors fearing rejection; however, when they find out he is a unicorn, they accept him because it’s okay to be different. The story does not mention LGBTQ+ issues.

Although the second graders at a school in Byram, Mississippi, thought Assistant Principal Toby Price’s Zoom reading of Dawn McMillan’s I Need a New Butt was hilarious, the administrative top brass fired him for inappropriate and unprofessional conduct. Many former students, parents, and even strangers have donated to his GoFundMe account to help him pay court costs for suing to get his job back.

As ultra conservative groups form in Ohio and elsewhere, the attack on books, schools, and libraries gains momentum. For example, Ohio’s HB322 and 327 if passed will punish teaching controversial subjects, like racism, with denying students credit for courses, not funding schools, and suspending teachers’ licenses. Last year state legislatures drafted bills making teaching banned books a crime or outlawing lessons about race, the civil rights movement, or diversity if the content might make white people feel bad.

We cannot repair the damage done by white privilege or learn from our mistakes if we do not discuss them and then change our ways in the future.

Own Your Own Piece of Journalism History

Gerry Lanosga and David Nord of Indiana University look at the rare 18^th & 19^th century publications that Nord is donating for the AJHA auction in Memphis.

by Mike Conway, 1st Vice President

What journalism or media historian would not like to have a framed front page of the Dallas Morning News from the John F. Kennedy assassination hanging on their wall? Or how about a Spiro Agnew watch? A World War II ration book? These are just three of dozens of items up for bid in the AJHA auction, which is part of our first in-person annual conference in three years, taking place in Memphis from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1.

This year’s auction has both an online and in-person presence. You can look at the items and start bidding now at our Galabid site.  As of this writing, there are more than 40 items up for bid and more on the way.

You can also see the items in person starting Thursday, Sept. 29 at the Sheraton Memphis Downtown Hotel. The bidding will end just before midnight Friday, Sept. 30. You will need to pay for your items online Saturday morning, and winning bidders will receive their media history items during the AJHA business meeting on Saturday, Oct. 1.

“Overbid and Often.”  You will often find great deals on historic items at the AJHA auction. But keep in mind that the purpose of this auction is to raise money for our Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend. If you can afford to bid (donate) higher, please do.  In the old days of the in-person auction, the late Mike Sweeney was a master at guilting us all into spending more money than we expected to help us fund student travel to our conference. Another option is to seek out a graduate student at the conference and see if they have their eye on any auction items and then bid on it for them.

Even though the bidding is online, you must be in Memphis to pick up your auction items. We will not be shipping any auction items. If you can’t be there but really want a specific auction object, you can talk to one of us going to Memphis to see if we’d be willing to get it to you in exchange for a healthy bid/donation.

Of course, we would also like to encourage everyone to donate directly to the Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend. You can do that any time. A reminder that this year’s healthy $400 travel stipend was only possible because of Mike and Carolyn Sweeney’s generous decision to list this fund in his obituary earlier this year, bringing in more than $5500. We won’t have that money next year, so the stipend amount will depend on how much money we can raise from the auction and other donations to the Sweeney Stipend.

We will also be honoring all of the graduate students involved in this year’s conference during the AJHA business meeting on Saturday, Oct. 1 at 10:10am in Memphis.

For those of you who have donated items for the auction, don’t forget to bring those items to Memphis. We will have instructions on where you can drop off your items when you register.

The AJHA auction is returning this year because of AJHA President Aimee Edmondson’s decision to put together a special committee to look into ways to encourage and support graduate students who get involved in our organization. Special thanks to Jason Guthrie, Gerry Lanosga, Erin Coyle, Michael Fuhlhage, and Claire Rounkles for their work on this committee over the past year.

If you have any questions about the auction, please get in touch with me at mtconway@indiana.edu.

Caption for mug photo: A New York Times Obama victory front page coffee cup, sold by the newspaper in 2009, is one of the items in the AJHA Auction in Memphis.

Former AJHA President David Vergobbi (center) recognizes outgoing committee chairs at the 2017 AJHA Conference.

by Mike Conway, 1st Vice President

As an all-volunteer organization, AJHA only succeeds because of the generous donation of time and expertise by its members. Right now, we have several opportunities for members to get involved in our group. If you have served on committees before and are looking for a new challenge, or if you haven’t been involved beyond membership and conferences, we’d like to hear from you.

In the current academic climate, we know there is added pressure to concentrate your service work on your home institutions. That is why we are very appreciative of everyone who gets involved in AJHA to keep the various committee efforts and the entire organization moving forward.

For those who are looking to guide one of our committees, we will soon (or now) have openings in Research, Membership, Graduate Students, and History in the Curriculum.

Committees that are looking for new members include Public Relations, Oral History, Membership, Education, and Service Awards.

If you don’t really know where to start, please let us know and we can find a position that matches your interests and time availability.

Let us know if are attending the conference in Memphis this month so we can talk to you in person about AJHA.

If you’d like to get involved, or have questions, you can contact me at mtconway@indiana.edu or AJHA 2^nd Vice President Tracy Lucht at tlucht@iastate.edu. You can also go to the AJHA Committee web page and contact the committee chairs directly.

As always, thanks to all of you who keep AJHA strong.

Ashley Walter with her Penn State advisor Ford Risley at the 2019 AJHA conference.

by Ashley Walter, Utah State University

My favorite AJHA conference, which was in Dallas in 2019, also happened to be my last in-person conference before COVID-19 struck. To be honest, I can’t tell you which presentation was my favorite, or even about my own presentation. I don’t recall what anyone wore, or if I was nervous before my presentation (although it’s safe to assume I was). Rather, I remember feeling immense support from other journalism historians. I fondly recollect lunching with a group of senior scholars who decided to treat a group of younger scholars to Mexican. We laughed, talked scholarship, and chatted about our families. Since 2019, I’ve spent the last couple of years emailing and Zooming with some of these senior scholars during an isolating pandemic.

This conference wasn’t unique. AJHA scholars are always welcoming and warm to graduate students. However, 2019 was the year I felt truly a part of the academic community. I hope you too can feel like a community member while you’re in Memphis, or at least start building the foundation. For those graduate students attending their first AJHA, I have tips and suggestions for you.

1.      Be present: It’s a small conference, so it’s very easy to meet people. If you have work to finish, do it in the hotel lobby where you might run into other people. Don’t hide in your room. Attend the events. Volunteer. Working at the registration table is your opportunity to meet everyone, including other graduate students.

2.      Don’t miss breakfast: There are two reasons you don’t want to miss breakfast. The first is obvious, as it’s included in the price of registration. I could stop there, but as it turns out, it’s also a great time to meet people. I don’t wait for people I know to begin eating. I just sit down and introduce myself. Conversation at 7 a.m. doesn’t come naturally to me, but I do it anyway. These conversations are casual, and you’ll get a feel for which panels you should go to throughout the day. It’s also nice to see friendly faces throughout the long day.

3.      Go on the tour: Each year AJHA offers an afternoon away from panels to attend a historic tour. The tour very much feels like a high school field trip, except instead of bored teenagers, this trip is filled with like-minded history nerds. It’s a great time to meet people. It usually includes a bus ride to and from the location. Sit by people you don’t know. They will talk to you! I didn’t attend the tour during my first two AJHAs and I regretted it once I finally went. 

4.      Don’t be afraid to ask: One of the best parts about AJHA is that scholars love graduate students. If you can’t afford to go to an event, senior scholars often sponsor graduate students. I was able to attend tours, lunches, and dinners because of the kindness of other scholars. Don’t be afraid to ask if there are any sponsored tour tickets or lunch tickets floating around. No one wants you to miss out on anything.

5.      Don’t be afraid to talk about yourself: It can be intimidating to be around scholars who publish books and are veterans of our craft. But don’t be afraid to talk about your research, even if it’s just budding. I cannot tell you the amount of fantastic advice I’ve been given in the halls of AJHA hotels. You’ll want to keep your Notes app open.

6.      Presentations: Show up early for your presentations and have your visual aid on a USB. Never go over your presentation time. Most people’s PowerPoint presentations aren’t very text heavy and usually include just a few visual aids. Also, I find that most people skip over the literature review and just dig right into their findings. Each panel ends with a question-and-answer portion. Don’t be nervous about this part. Any horror stories you’ve heard about combative Q&A's don’t happen at AJHA. Scholars are there to build knowledge and support others. If you don’t know the answer to a question, feel free to use this line: “That’s a great question! That was outside the scope of this research, but I’ll be sure to look into it.”

7.      Clothing: AJHA dress is business casual during the presentations, but casual otherwise. Don’t be afraid to wear comfortable shoes/clothing, especially during the tour. It’s usually a busy day and includes a lot of walking.

8.      Be nice to yourself: My first two years I felt like a graduate student lurking on the sidelines. And I was. That’s not to say people weren’t friendly in 2017 and 2018—in fact, they very much were. While confidence surely played a role, 2019 was different because, after a few years of attending, I really put myself “out there” at the annual conference. I went to all the events and eventually, I saw more faces I recognized than didn’t. So, if you leave your first AJHA feeling like a lurking graduate student, that’s totally normal. You are!

9. One last thing: I am sure other AJHA members have even better tips. I suggest you ask them in Memphis this year.

Gwyneth Mellinger is a professor in the School of Media Arts & Design at James Madison University. She is serving her second term on the AJHA Board of Directors. Her research focuses on the southern press of the 1950s, the newsroom diversity movement, and journalism ethics. Mellinger is the author of Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and co-editor, with John Ferré, of Journalism’s Ethical Progression: A Twentieth-Century Journey.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA?

I was recruited by Carolyn Kitch. While working on my doctorate in American Studies, I presented a paper at the 2004 conference of the Middle-Atlantic American Studies Association in Lehigh, PA. This was my very first paper presentation, and I had the good fortune to draw Carolyn as the moderator and respondent. She suggested that AJHA would be an appropriate venue for the research I was doing on race and press history. In 2005 I attended my first AJHA conference in San Antonio and have missed only a few since then. Although American Studies influences my approach to scholarship, AJHA and the AEJMC History Division have been my primary academic homes.

You'll be receiving two awards for your paper at the upcoming AJHA convention. What inspired this research? How does it fit into your overall research agenda?

The paper examines criticism of the Pittsburg Courier’s Double V campaign that appeared in the white press during the early years of World War II. The paper is in conversation with the extensive research on the wartime Black press by Patrick Washburn and others, but my project asks why prominent whites like syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler and newspaper editor Virginius Dabney, who wrote for magazines, used their national platforms to disparage the Black press in 1942. Given the existential threat posed by fascism, why was the Black press suddenly their priority? The historical context of the wartime civil rights movement is important, as is the oppositional relationship between the Black and white presses. Ultimately, I am concerned with how this discourse fed into the segregationist backlash during the 1950s.

What can you tell us about other research projects you're working on?

I am on leave from JMU this semester to work on a book I hope will be published in the Journalism and Democracy series at UMass Press. The AJHA paper has already been folded into a chapter in that manuscript, which explores the ways that the white press, particularly in the South, tried to use journalism standards like objectivity to control the news narrative as civil rights gains chipped away at the legal and social structure that supported white privilege and Black subjugation. I’ve been collecting research for this book for years; earlier AJHA papers on the Associated Press and the Southern Education Reporting Service also contribute to this historical narrative. This also underscores one of the benefits of the AJHA scholarly community, where a project like this can evolve over time.

How has your career as a professional journalist informed your historical research?

I love doing archival research, which feels like doing journalism except all my sources are dead. My methodological technique, specifically the way I focus the scope of an inquiry and triangulate information, is something I knew how to do before graduate school. The perspective of the journalist also has allowed me to see that nothing happens in isolation, that historical events or episodes (topics for conference papers) are part of an overarching narrative. Graduate seminars that teach this are useful, of course, but being a journalist is on-the-job training for work in the archive. In addition, my years as a journalist provide insight into newswork and the function of the press. These are not theoretical concepts for me, even if I am doing research on a period that preceded my own time in the newsroom.

How do you incorporate your historical knowledge into your teaching of non-historical subjects?

In the spring my teaching portfolio will be courses in media ethics and media literacy. I am this year transitioning from administrative duties to full-time teaching and research. In neither of my spring courses will it be possible to draw students through the content without placing it in historical context. Our conceptions of both media ethics and media literacy have evolved over time, and the fact of this change makes history relevant to how students perceive the subjects today. Nothing about media is static and that is one of my themes in the classroom.

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of academia?

I’ve been fortunate to travel a fair amount and am looking forward to doing more now that we have vaccines for covid. I also have a semester-long teaching-abroad opportunity coming up in a few years. I was fortunate to spend a semester in the UK and to take numerous side trips then. My husband and I have a list of places we want to visit before we hang up our passports.

My relaxation is gardening. When I get writer’s block, I often head outside, where the act of pulling weeds or working the dirt gives me the space to reflect on my work. Even if I don’t return to the den with an insight, I’m in a different place mentally when I do resume my writing. This year I harvested 88 heads of garlic, along with tomatoes, squash, asparagus, peppers and melons.

Historian David McCullough personified curiosity, something we REALLY could use a lot more of right now

by Aimee Edmondson, President

Eulogies for two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough laud his storytelling skills, his sonorous narration of Ken Burn’s “The Civil War,” and note his shock of white hair. 

As America says goodbye to McCullough (1933-2022, funeral service scheduled for August 16 in West Tisbury, Mass.), we might contemplate another, perhaps unheralded, McCullough attribute: curiosity.

In this hyper-partisan era, where toxic divisions threaten the very survival of our democracy, I suggest that curiosity might help us figure out how to overcome the mentality of the raging online mob. Let me explain, but before I do, I’ll acknowledge that to some critics, McCullough might personify our tendency to overwrite about “great men.” Indeed, McCullough wrote about the Wright Brothers, Harry Truman and John Adams, all stories well told. But he also wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, the Johnstown flood and more. Typically he started out knowing little about his subject. He was just curious about this person or that, this thing or that. And most importantly, perhaps, he brought his love of history to the masses. He helped millions understand the importance of history.

His curiosity attracted him to stories that might seem widely noted, yet were under told in some way and often relating to people who overcame long odds.

Asking questions, including tough questions, is a high calling. The life and achievements of McCullough show us that curiosity leads to actual discovery, coexists with courtesy, and it must be life-long, not just for children.

Consider the genesis of McCullough’s late-in-life book “The Pioneers,” published in 2019.

As McCullough prepared his 2004 commencement speech at Ohio University on its 200^th anniversary, he was intrigued by the name on the oldest building on campus here in Athens, Ohio: Cutler Hall, opened in 1819. It is also the oldest building in what was then called by white settlers the Northwest Territory of the United States. With its red brick federal architecture, Cutler Hall now houses our university president’s office and other administrative offices. It is a museum in its own right.

That curiosity — who was Cutler? — prompted McCullough to write “The Pioneers.”

Manasseh Cutler, a Massachusetts minister, established Ohio University in 1804. Adhering to terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Cutler and other investors in the Ohio Company of Associates set aside land for a public university in the Appalachian foothills. Note that six native American tribes perhaps most noted in Ohio’s history were in this territory: the Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, Miami, Seneca-Cayuga and Wyandot, the last being forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1843.

The early white pioneers chronicled in McCullough’s book traveled on foot from New England to Pittsburgh (where McCullough was born), and then in the Spring of 1788 built boats to navigate the Ohio River to start a riverfront settlement they called Marietta – about 50 miles upriver from where I live today in Athens.

Marietta College Special Collections Manager Linda Showalter helped McCullough with his research at the library there: "He is curious about everything. When David discovered a great story, his excitement was contagious. He was always cheerful and enthusiastic during his research, and at one time was inspired by a piece of sheet music to sing a little song for us."

McCullough was an octogenarian at that point.

In his research, McCullough learned that Manasseh Cutler was a Yale grad and schoolteacher who became a chaplain during the Revolutionary War. He later served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and took the lead in writing the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory, particularly noted for drafting prohibitions regarding slavery in the new territories that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Curiosity is a strength, McCullough reminds us. Besides that life lesson, his curiosity about early “pioneers” yielded broader points about support for education and freedom of religion and opposition to slavery.

It was announced on August 8 that McCullough died at the age of 89. It’s also notable that President Richard Nixon announced his resignation on Aug. 8, 1974. And on Aug. 8, 2022, FBI agents raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida home in search of classified documents amid possible violations of the Espionage Act.

In an editorial last week in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, columnist John Rash noted the date. “However coincidental, the auspicious Aug. 8 timing is the type of symmetry America's eminent historian might wisely tie together in weighing the ways the presidency reflected — or led — the polarization that's only deepened over those 48 years.” 

Unfortunately, Rash notes, the partisan raging on the internet did nothing to illuminate the history and the context of the unprecedented raid at Mar-a-Lago. But McCullough wouldn’t have partaken in the real-time discussion anyway. He took years with his meticulous research to bring his characters vividly back to life.

Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley pointed out that McCullough was “loved at the George W. Bush [Presidential] Library and was friends with Barack Obama. McCullough transcended party affiliation. And that was a conscious effort on his part, to unify our country by our shared history.”

Brinkley also lamented the loss of “referees in American life” such as Walter Cronkite. “There is not one trusted source anymore due to the balkanization of media.” Of course, members of the AJHA know this story all too well.

Cronkite, Brinkley said, advocated the teaching of media literacy. But “we're not teaching [that] in schools, so misinformation is running supreme.” And “until you can attack that cancer on the national soul and be able to have fact-based and trusted referees out there it’s a Wild-West environment out there and it doesn't do our democracy any good.”

Late in life, though, McCullough continued to connect history and vivid storytelling to the challenges of these modern times, quoting Cutler’s son, Ephraim: “If ignorance could be banished from our land, a real millennium would commence.”

Blessed are the curious.

by David Sloan, University of Alabama (emeritus)

One of my brothers died in April, and family members, including his wife of fifty years, were uncertain about such basic details as where he served in the Army and even where he was born.

When people die, think of all the knowledge that vanishes with them.

So it wasn’t a grandiose vision that led me to write my memoirs. It was a simple plan. I wrote my memoirs mainly for my two children and five grandchildren. If any of them should want to know something about me after I’m gone, maybe they can find it in my memoirs. If they’re not interested, perhaps years from now a descendent unknown will be.

Because the memoirs are primarily for my family, they tell of such things as how I spent my childhood, what I did in high school, how I decided as a college freshman that I wanted to be a professor, how I met my future wife by a singular coincidence, and what I did on my four newspaper jobs.

But since I spent much of my life in academia and history, a large part of my memoirs covers those areas.

Even though the largest portion of my time as a professor involved the study of history, it was not my original plan. I had intended to specialize in law in my doctoral program at the University of Texas. My decision to switch to history surprised even me.

I got hardly any guidance as I studied history. Yet my dissertation opened my eyes to some of the biggest problems that plagued the study of JMC history.

When I was trying to choose a dissertation topic, my committee gave me only the most meager idea about what to do. My advisor came to the rescue. He told me, “Choose something no one’s ever studied.”

That sounds simple enough. But consider: How can one be aware of something in history that no one has ever written about? It’s not easy. I went ahead and tried to come up with something. Later, it dawned on me that the reason no one has written about some topics is that no one’s interested in them. They’re unimportant or, worse, boring.

I suggested the party press from 1789 to 1816 as my topic. Hardly any historian had written about it in the 20th century. In fact, historians had disparaged it since long before I was born. They gave it the sobriquet “The Dark Ages of American Journalism.”

As I read through hundreds and hundreds of primary sources, something strange kept popping up. Historians said the newspapers were terrible. But people of the time thought they were important. They even praised the papers! Can you imagine that? How could they be so misinformed? Didn’t they realize that the papers weren’t doing the proper job of newspapers?

Then it struck me. Historians were the ones who got it wrong. They were judging the newspapers by journalistic standards that only appeared later. They were expecting editors of the party period to perform by criteria of the historians’ time.

The problem, present-mindedness, is well-known to historians, but journalism historians in 1980 were oblivious to the error.

Once I realized where the problem lay, I could see all of journalism history in a new light.

My dissertation planted the seed for much of the research and writing that I did in my academic career.

The greater portion of my efforts was aimed at trying to improve practices in our field and to elevate history’s importance in the broader field of mass communication education.

One of the biggest efforts was the AJHA. Gary Whitby and I started it in 1982, and Gary founded its journal, American Journalism. Ten years later, I started the AJHA Southeast Symposium, and even after retiring from teaching I created the online journal Historiography in Mass Communication. My memoirs detail each of those efforts.

They were of great importance for me, but I spent more time on writing and editing books. Several focused in some way or other on historiography.

The first one was American Journalism History: An Annotated Bibliography. I won’t waste words explaining why I did it, but will only say that it was mainly for my own benefit. I figured that, to be a historian, one needs to be familiar with the literature in the field. I began work on it the summer after completing my dissertation, and over the next eight years read more than 2,600 books and articles. It was the best education I ever got.

My original plan in compiling the bibliography was to identify the various schools of JMC historians and explain their interpretations of the major periods and topics in the field. That effort eventually led to the book Perspectives on Mass Communication History.

At the same time I was working on Perspectives, Jim Startt and I began Historical Methods in Mass Communication. Jim knows more about historical methodology than any other JMC historian ever has, and his expertise shows in that book. I estimate that around 2,000 students, as well as some professors, have learned how to do historical research from it.

Not all books were so esoteric. The first edition of The Media in America was published in 1990. With it, my goal was to provide an accurate and authoritative textbook that gave students a good historical grounding. It is now in its eleventh edition.

I worked as a professor for thirty-eight years. I had a privileged life.

When my two grandsons were small children, they were riding with me through downtown Tuscaloosa on a hot August day. A construction crew was hard at work on a new hotel. Matthew and Garrett knew I was a professor and had an office job.

Matthew, five years old, watched the workers. He declared, “Some people have to work like dogs.”

He paused and then added, “You know, Grandad, you’ve got the greatest job in the world. All you have to do is sit down all day — and do nothing.”

W. Joseph Campbell is a full professor at the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. He joined the faculty there 25 years ago this month, after completing his PhD in mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At American, Campbell has written seven solo-authored books, including Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (Praeger, 2001) and, most recently, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections (University of California, 2020). His work also has appeared in numerous print and online outlets, including the Baltimore Sun, CNN, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Washington Post. He has appeared several times on C-SPAN to share his research, doing so of late on the cable network’s “Lectures in History” series. Before entering the academy, Campbell was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Hartford Courant and for the Associated Press in Switzerland, Poland, and West Africa.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA?

I attended my first AJHA conference in October 1996, while I was working on my PhD at UNC-Chapel Hill. Peggy Blanchard was a UNC professor who encouraged her graduate students to consider submitting seminar papers for prospective presentation at AJHA. And so I did.

I wrote a paper about yellow journalism and the press of West Africa, which was accepted for presentation at the conference that year in London, Ontario. I remember it was a well-planned gathering — a great venue with wonderful meals. The local host, the late David Spencer, did it up right. It was a memorable introduction to AJHA.

You'll be receiving the Eberhard award for your paper on “proto-pack journalism” during the Civil War at the upcoming AJHA convention. What inspired this research? How does it fit into your overall research agenda?

The paper is drawn from an emergent research interest that considers the immediate aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg from differing perspectives, including confused, erroneous, and even bizarre newspaper reporting. One reason this emergent topic is so intriguing is that it differs markedly from my recent book projects, which were about media-driven myths, the lasting importance of the year 1995, and polling failure in U.S. presidential elections.

Until now, I haven’t done much research into aspects of the American Civil War, although during my childhood, I used to visit the Gettysburg battlefield fairly often, on trips to see cousins who lived nearby.

I’m honored to be a recipient — now a two-time recipient — of the Eberhard award. Its namesake, Wally Eberhard, was an AJHA stalwart, a wonderful guy with a twinkle in his eye. He had this enviable knack for offering criticism without making it seem deeply critical or harsh. I miss Wally.

You also are the recipient of a 2022 McKerns Grant. What can you tell us about the research you plan to do with those funds?

I am delighted to be a recipient of a McKerns grant and expect it to help provide dimension and momentum to my aftermath-of-Gettysburg research project that’s in its early stages. I expect to use the funds principally to travel to archival holdings at Columbia University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library of Congress.

I received a McKerns grant in 2007, the year it was introduced, and the funds helped me complete research on my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong (University of California Press, 2010, 2017).

How has your long career as a professional journalist informed your historical research?

I left the newsroom in 1995 to enter an accelerated PhD program in mass communication at Chapel Hill, which I loved. I never looked back.

Even so, some 20 years as a newspaper and wire service reporter implanted a strong measure of skepticism, especially about politicians of whatever stripe. And that skepticism has certainly informed my historical research, especially into media-driven myths. The exaggerated content of New York’s yellow press fomented armed conflict with Spain in 1898? Walter Cronkite swung public opinion with a single, on-air pronouncement in 1968 about the war in Vietnam? Woodward and Bernstein’s newspaper reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency? I mean, really? Is that how it all happened?

Being suspicious about such well-known, media-centric narratives can be traced to having been a working journalist in the U.S. and abroad.

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of academia?

I’ve worked portions of five summers out-of-doors with grounds crews in the arboretum that is the main campus of American University.

Closer to home, I like to split firewood and stack it for seasoning. I know that seems uncommonly woodsy for someone living in a close-in suburb of Washington. But there you have it.

The close-in suburb is a self-governing municipality in Maryland, and I sometimes take an outspoken role in local politics. My Dad was active in small-town politics in Pennsylvania when I was growing up, so I inherited that interest. I’m not going to run for local office, though.

I used to do a lot of blogging, mostly to support my books. I don’t have the time to post very often these days. Still, my Media Myth Alert blog is almost 13 years old.