by Cathy Jackson, Nominations and Elections Chair

It’s that time of the year when AJHA members learn about the candidates for open leadership slots. Two AJHA members were nominated to serve as second vice-president, and four members are vying for three seats on the board of directors. The 2nd VP, under normal circumstances, rises to the presidency in two years, then serves on the Board as ex-officio for an additional two years. Board members serve for three years and are expected to attend board meetings at the annual convention.

Additional nominations can be made from the floor during the election that will take place at the annual member business meeting on Saturday, Oct. 1. The ballot also will include a proposed constitutional amendment.

After elections are held, current Second Vice-President Tracy Lucht (Iowa State University) will become first vice-president for 2022-2023, and First Vice-President Mike Conway (Indiana University) will become president.

Proxy Voting

Dues-paying AJHA members unable to attend the conference are eligible to vote by proxy. They should send their name, email address, and the name of the person who will cast their proxy vote at the conference to AJHA Nominations and Elections Committee Chair Cathy Jackson (cmjackson@nsu.edu) no later than midnight Friday, Sept. 23, 2022. PLEASE CONFIRM IN ADVANCE that the proxy voter will be at the business meeting on Oct. 1 and is willing to cast the proxy vote.

Nominees

Second Vice-President

Paulette Kilmer (University of Toledo) has been a member of AJHA for almost 30 years, joining as a graduate student in the mid-1980s. She received two President’s Awards: for leadership of the Donna Allen Luncheon and for filling both editor positions on the Intelligencer and American Journalism in the same year. Kilmer served on the Education and Curriculum committees and chaired the Publications Committee. Her research examines newspapers, magazines, and other forms of pop culture in the 19^th century as narrative and myth. Her major research theme is the power of factually based stories to shape the way readers see themselves and the world, thus reinforcing stereotypes, hidden privilege, and misinformation.

Debbie van Tuyll (professor emerita, Augusta University) has been a member for about 25 years. She has won the Kobre Award (2019), the Jean Palmegiano Award (2018), a couple of honorable mentions here and there, and the McKerns Award. She served on the Convention Committee when she was a new member and served as a board member twice. She has refereed papers for the convention and for American Journalism. Van Tuyll is an editor of the Southeastern Review of Journalism History, which is co-published by her university department and the Southeastern Symposium of AJHA. For more than 15 years, she helped organize and run the Symposium and supported it by bringing students to present papers. Her research interests are Civil War-era journalism, transnational journalism history, and the earliest Irish American press.

Board of Directors

Mark Bernhardt (professor, Jackson State University) has been a member of the AJHA for six years. He currently serves on the History in the Curriculum Committee and editorial board of Historiography in Mass Communication. In 2020, he was awarded the Joseph McKerns Research Grant and has published in both American Journalism and Journalism History. His research interests include how newspapers, films, and television engage in public discourse about social and cultural issues connected to imperialism and its legacy in the transnational North American West, U.S. involvement in wars, and intersectionality in U.S. society.

Elisabeth Fondren (assistant professor, St. John's University) has been a member of AJHA for six years. She received the Wally Eberhard Award for Outstanding Research in Media and War (2016), the Robert Lance Memorial Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper (2016), the Jean Palmegiano Award for Outstanding Paper on International/Transnational Journalism (2021 and 2017), honorable mention for the Blanchard Dissertation Prize (2019), the Joseph McKerns Research Grant (2020), and the Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper on Woman's History (2021). Her AJHA involvement includes serving on the AJHA Curriculum Committee and the Coordinating Committee for the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference (JJCHC). She continuously reviews for American Journalism and the AJHA conference. Her research interests focus on the history of international journalism, government propaganda, military-media relations, and freedom of speech during wartime. 

Thomas A. Mascaro (professor emeritus, Bowling Green State University) has been a member for 17 years and is the recipient of an honorable mention for the AJHA Book of the Year Award (2013), American Journalism’s Best Article Award (2018), co-winner of the Wally Eberhard Award for Best Paper on Media and War, honorable mention for the William David Sloan Award for Top Faculty Paper (2020), and co-runner-up for the Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper on Women’s History (2022). Mascaro has served as the chair the Service Awards Committee, long-time reviewer for American Journalism, judge for the AJHA Book Award competition, and as a referee for the annual convention’s paper selection. He also is an editorial board member for Historiography of Mass Communication, a non-AJHA, online journal that is closely affiliated with AJHA members (since 2019). His research interests include Network News documentary research, broadcast journalism history, Vietnam-era media history, including Southeast Asia, First Amendment history related to broadcast journalism, presidential & media history, and media and culture history.

Ashley Walter (journalism post-doctoral fellow, Utah State University) has been a member of AJHA for six years. She was the recipient of the 2019 Robert Lance Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper and the 2022 Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper on Women’s History, and she has received honorable mentions for the Robert Lance Award (2022) and the Wally Eberhard Award for Outstanding Paper on Media and War (2017). She served for two years as editorial assistant for American Journalism and is a member of the Oral History Committee. Walter’s research interest is media history with a focus on women's labor and magazine research. Her work is published in Journalism History, American Journalism, and The Journal of Magazine Media.

The AJHA Board of Directors is proposing an amendment to the Constitution and Bylaws that will allow for annual elections to be conducted online in a regular conference year.

President Aimee Edmondson brought the proposal to the board in July, and the board unanimously agreed to place the amendment on the upcoming AJHA election ballot. 

Per the constitution's current language, members vote to fill officer and board seats at the member business meeting, held in person at the annual convention. For the past two years, we have conducted elections online on an emergency basis because we did not meet in person. Passage of the constitutional amendment would allow the organization to have online elections in the future even when the conference meets in person. However, because members will vote to approve the amendment at (and not before) this year's election, the 2022 election will be held in person per the constitution's current language.

When the constitution and bylaws were created, the AJHA was a smaller organization and most everyone came to the convention. Now we have more than 300 members, but our conference attendance rarely exceeds 150--many of whom are new to the organization. To be more democratic and allow all members the reasonable opportunity to vote, we aim to follow the lead of other learned societies and conduct our elections online.

Current language is as follows:

Section 3.02 ELECTIONS. In advance of the annual convention, the Nominations and Elections Committee will call for nominations to fill vacant Officer and Board seats, verify the willingness of prospective candidates to serve, and prepare a ballot for presentation to the membership at the business meeting of the annual convention. Nominations may also be made from the floor.

The proposed amendment would eliminate the highlighted language so that the constitution does not require an in-person election at the convention. Simply eliminating the business meeting specification and not prescribing a specific alternative means of conducting the election reduces the likelihood that further amendments will need to be made later as technology and the organization’s culture changes.

Per the Constitution and Bylaws, amendments must be advertised to the membership at least one month in advance of member voting, which will occur this year at the member business meeting on Oct. 1 in Memphis. [See bios of officer and board nominees.]

Dues-paying AJHA members unable to attend the conference are eligible to vote by proxy. They should send their name, email address, and the name of the person who will cast their proxy vote at the conference to AJHA Nominations and Elections Committee Chair Cathy Jackson (cmjackson@nsu.edu) no later than midnight Friday, September 23, 2022. PLEASE CONFIRM IN ADVANCE that the proxy voter will be at the business meeting on Oct. 1 and is willing to cast the proxy vote.

by Julien Gorbach, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

The years of the pandemic drove home to me how much I love sharing an actual classroom with students, but as our society plunges inexorably deeper into the virtual, there are amazing new worlds of opportunity now opening up before us. As media historians, we bring a triple threat to digital storytelling: we are already skilled and experienced in multimedia reporting; we know—or should know—digital media collections better than any other category of scholars or professionals; and media studies is our wheelhouse. Our students choose to be journalism majors because they prefer to make stories and media, not just study them, and the same can be said for many of our mass communication majors in general.

When I signed on to teach our first iteration of a graduate-level class on digital storytelling last semester, I did so with trepidation. The course originally had been proposed and designed by a technically adept documentary filmmaker and transmedia storyteller, but he had left our faculty before actually teaching the class, so my colleagues reached out for a volunteer. I had taught historical methods for mass communication before, and I was excited by the remarkable developments with digital collections, as well as by the issues and debates around those. I envisioned a modified media historiography course that would focus on the burgeoning “digital humanities” aspects of our discipline, with online student projects as the deliverables. But I knew my prep time would be extremely limited, and I feared that I’d show up full of ideas but without the practical knowledge and plans to execute them. I was confident that our class would uncover great primary source material and grapple with important debates, but I worried that the software would prove frustrating for us all.

I was therefore surprised and delighted to discover that as dark as our current times may be in many respects, we are living through a period of extraordinary innovation for media history storytelling. Over the past ten years, a broad range of sophisticated and powerful digital tools for creating interactive maps, timelines, and storylines have become available that are not only easy to learn and powerful in themselves, but also become exponentially more powerful when combined. Some AJHA members may already be aware of all of these platforms, but it's worth taking stock to consider what opportunities they present for our courses and programs.

I’m not sure how it has eluded me for so long, but finding Northwestern University’s KnightLab suite of six Storytelling tools was a revelation. I also discovered that our university has the online version of Esri’s ArcGIS, which is far easier to learn and more powerful than the desktop version and could quickly be made available to students for free. This is not just mapping software; it’s also an elegant web builder, with a variety of storytelling capabilities and ways of integrating those tools together. And finally, I found Twine, a tool for interactive non-linear storytelling, the kind of thing many of us are familiar with from the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, or from the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which appeared on Netflix in 2018. Again, I’d recommend the online version.

Once I found these tools and discovered how easy they are to learn, the rest of the course design was easy. The goal was for each student team to create a public-facing digital storytelling project by the end of term. We approached the course as a collaborative exercise from the start. We organized the groups by shared interests and by the multimedia skills and experience that each team member brought to the table. Originally, the date for the first project pitch was to be in early March, but within days of starting the semester, I shifted that deadline to early February, in order to provide more time for troubleshooting. That turned out to be a wise decision, for which I must credit the advice of fellow AJHA member Jennifer Moore of the University of Minnesota.

We devoted our first three weeks to the broader debates about media historiography and digitization. In addition to seminal readings by James Carey, David Paul Nord, and Michael Schudson, and chapters of Richard Evans’ indispensable book about historiography, In Defense of History, we covered discussions, for example, of what defines an “archive” and how that’s different from a “digital collection”; how skipping a visit to the physical locale of an archive often strips out crucial context; and how poor Optical Character Recognition, lack of images in a news story collection, or low-quality reproduction can affect what we think we know. Students also read chapters about copyright from Archival Storytelling by Sheila Curran Bernard and Kenn Rabin and took an online multiple-choice quiz that I created for it. But because everything we did was protected by the Fair Use doctrine, and because much of what they used was in the public domain anyway, I was not strict about policing their use of digital content.

We focused on “multimedia” for weeks four through seven—print (and historical newspaper collections); photo and video; and sound, with separate weeks on podcasting and oral history. (These last categories are two great examples of the fresh opportunities of digital storytelling: You combine sound with maps on a website or in a mobile app, and you’ve created a new kind of history.) We carried on scholarly readings and discussion, but also did readings, class presentations, and workshops on the respective skills sets. Weeks eight through twelve covered “digital tools”: timelines, interactive storytelling, mapping, data-oriented storytelling, and VR, AR, and XR. We also did a “field trip” to our university library archives and hosted guest speakers:  Puakea Nogelmeier, a founder of the Hawaiian Language Newspaper Project, and Robert Hernandez, a professor of emerging media at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

I took away three lessons from the experience, two of which are technical, but important. The first is that with digital tools you have to be careful, at the outset, with integration: Many of the KnightLab tools did not embed well, or at all, in websites built with Wix, Canva, or other site-building platforms, and ArcGIS is itself a website platform. The second lesson is that while the tools may be easy to learn, finding the right assets—photo, text, video, etc.—and then getting those assets to work within the tools can be considerably time-consuming, even setting aside the time required for the basic historical research. Often links work, but students will also likely need to use software like 4K Video Downloader to capture video, or QuickTime to strip out the audio, and must keep in mind that some websites won’t allow them to grab the content. It is important to warn students about these challenges at the outset.

And finally, I discovered that digital storytelling may be a godsend for drawing students and expanding and enriching our programs. For projects in my undergraduate media history class this fall, I plan to partner with Gale and Readex, two major providers of online historic newspaper collections. Gale has a Digital Scholar Lab that will enable us to experiment with some of the most cutting-edge research tools, while Readex has some fascinating collections of Black and nineteenth century papers. Some mass communication students, I’ve found, love both reporting and archival storytelling, but others, who are fascinated by media past and present, much prefer the storytelling and design to shoeleather reporting.

For years, media history has been marginalized by faculty and administrators who have decided the past doesn’t matter much. Digital storytelling offers us an opportunity to not only keep history relevant, but also to present it as vital to the current and future growth of our departments.

The digital storytelling projects of COM 645:

DAVID FAGEN: AN AMERICAN REBEL

By Avión Plummer, David Massey-Torres, Dwayne Campos

“ALOHA” WAIKIKI

By Cindy Knapman and Ali Muhammad Ijaz

CRAWL: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOTEL AND RESORT DEVELOPMENT IN WAIKIKI

By Reanna Salvador 

OAHU'S CLASSIC RESTAURANTS: GOING BEYOND THE PLATE

By Justine Kuna Sison, Haider Hussain, Liza Marie Corotan and Payton Osborne

Anna E. Lindner (MA, Media Culture, and Communication, New York University) is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. A critical/cultural media historian, her dissertation focuses on how mediated discourses represent and are influenced by white supremacy, national/colonial identity, slavery, and resistance enacted by African descendants in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. Her other research interests include formations of cultural identity, racialized linguistics and education, intersectional feminisms and queer studies, critical whiteness studies, and racial justice activism.

Anna's paper "Race and Social Status: A Content Analysis of the Colonial Cuban Newspaper Gaceta de la Habana, 1849" is the top student paper in the History Division at this year's AEJMC conference.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA?

In 2019, when I joined the Wayne State doctoral program, I started research with my advisor, Dr. Michael Fuhlhage, who has been an enthusiastic AJHA member for many years. After a year of looking at old Cuban newspapers, I presented our paper on William Walker’s filibustering campaign in Nicaragua at the 2020 AJHA convention, and I was able to meet several smart, supportive scholars who love what they do. In 2021, we presented our paper on representations of the Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River borderlands newspapers, which won the Snorgrass minorities topic paper award and is currently under review for publication.

How did you become interested in historical research?

As a homeschooler, historical fiction was my favorite genre. This passion was solidified by the excellent history teachers I had in high school, especially when they encouraged civic engagement and framed history as a way to understand and pursue social justice, my other passion.

Tell us about your award-winning paper for AEJMC History Division. What drew you to the topic? How does it fit in with your overall dissertation research?

A history major in college who was involved in racial justice initiatives on campus, I focused on African diasporic and Latin American histories. My advisor, an Afro-Caribbeanist, encouraged me to study enslaved women in nineteenth-century Cuba—that was in 2015, and I’ve been studying African descendants in colonial diaspora ever since! I’m interested in how racial terms are deployed in colonial discourse, resulting in this project: a content analysis of 1849 issues of a Spanish colonial Cuban newspaper, Gaceta de la Habana. The paper feeds directly into my dissertation research on how the discourses of press stories, legal reports, and personal letters written by colonial authorities both construct the racialized “other” and reify institutional power and ideologies. 

How does your historical knowledge inform your teaching of non-historical topics?

I constantly (often unconsciously) ground phenomena, observations, examples, etc. in historical events. This impulse to contextualize, buttressed by attention to detail and the importance of making holistic arguments that try to account for as many factors as possible, makes me a better instructor and scholar.

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

I’m still trying to determine what “life outside of work” might mean for me because I don’t have good work/life boundaries, but the main non-academic thing I do is exercise—I’m a certified personal trainer on the side and love being outside. Because I’m such an introvert, my attempts to be involved in activism have been more successful since I’ve been able to attend webinars and other events online and volunteer for tasks I can do remotely (and alone). I’m also very passionate about sleep and food, and enjoy music, gaming, and watching movies/TV shows (I only critique them as media objects about half of the time).

by Will Mari, Louisiana State University

I wish I could say that I know what I’m doing when it comes to working with sources in media history. But that’s not entirely true—I’m still learning hard lessons about how to engage with challenging materials.

Case in point: trade publications—including Editor & Publisher (recently digitized by Archive.org), the Society of Professional Journalists’ Quill, and the UK-based Press Gazette—are rich and complex, sharing the values and beliefs of the journalism trade over the past century, but also its flaws and foibles. I’ve used them (among other sources, including memoirs, textbooks, correspondence, and archival material) to write two books for Routledge and one for the University of Missouri Press.

They are problematic. Editor & Publisher, especially, represented the voices of owners (who were often publishers, as the name implies), as well as senior editors and other “newsroom bosses.” Rare is the presence of lower-level editors, women, and people of color until comparatively recently. As the comprehensive trade journal for the U.S. and arguably most of Canada, however, it is an important resource for any media historian, especially now that its contents are text-searchable from c. 1901 to 2015. What is important is thus not whether or not to use it, but how to use it. By itself, it tends to represent triumphant, majoritarian, anti-union, sometimes classist perspectives. And yet, it’s not quite that simple.

Throughout the 1950s, for example, Editor & Publisher carried out a long crusade against government secrecy during the early Cold War and contained some of the first trenchant critiques of the handling of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist obsessions. Later on, the magazine was also interested, often critically, in coverage of newsroom integration efforts and the adoption of computers and later the internet in newsrooms. It’d be lazy to dismiss it, though perhaps too easy to embrace its managerial advocacy. Instead, it’s a messy, contingent source—in other words, the kind of historical record that reflects the reality of its time.

This is true, too, of SPJ’s Quill, which retains a slightly scrappier, more rank-and-file orientation. Throughout the Great Depression, the publication was replete with how-to stories about how to leave journalism, and generally covered the unionization movement (led by the American Newspaper Guild) more fairly than Editor & Publisher. Many of its writers were college-educated, of course, but it was less worried about making powerful people happy and more interested in advocating for regular news workers.

While it has not been digitized (though it should be!), many public libraries, especially university libraries (such as the University of Oregon) contain complete, bound-volume runs. I would encourage my colleagues to incorporate it in their projects. An added bonus—the tables of contents are fairly comprehensive, meaning that it’s relatively easy to skim. And beginning in the mid-1990s, it is at least partially online for those with university library access.

Similarly, the UK Press Gazette, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review, all have at least some online archives, especially from the 1990s and early 2000s onward, and often bound volumes can be found via interlibrary loan. I’d be happy to help you track down copies—please just reach out to me at my email address (members can find it in the AJHA directory).

No one source is perfect, again, but trade publications tend to showcase the then-current thinking or best practices in journalism at certain points in time, and they can act as important meso-level sources for analyzing particular moments in media or journalism history, checking other, more regional sources, and tracing, perhaps more broadly, big trends in the field over time.

I know from experience that they provide incomplete, or even clouded, pictures of journalism. However, for tracking the development of, for example, the use of radio cars in news coverage (something I talk about in my 2021 book), they are invaluable, and, in addition to stories, contain cartoons, photos, and illustrations. Editor & Publisher has been especially generous with allowing for re-publication of images in either books or articles—something that’s not always a guarantee.

So, in sum, I would encourage folks to use trade publications early and often in their research, almost regardless of topical focus—they are complicated but rewarding sources.

A former chair of the AEJMC History Division, Will Mari is an assistant professor of media history and media law at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. His book The American Newsroom: A History, 1920-1960 (2021) was a runner-up for this year's AJHA Book of Year Award.

He also is the author of Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990–2010 (2022) and A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies (2019), covering the social-cultural history of the American newsroom during the interwar years and early Cold War.

Carolyn Kitch is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Journalism in the Department of Journalism and the Media and Communication Doctoral Program of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. She is this year's recipient of the Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award, presented by the AEJMC History Division to honor a scholar who has a long record of excellence in media history. She has authored, co-authored, or co-edited five books as well as more than 70 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews--many of them focusing on memory studies.

When and how did you first become involved with AJHA?

When I began graduate school, I was in an American Studies master’s program, and I submitted a paper about Willa Cather’s journalism, not knowing if it – or I – would fit into this organization. My first conference was in London, Ontario and hosted by David Spencer, and when I met him, I knew that this was a special group. For 25 years that has remained true. The people in this organization are very supportive of each other’s research and very fun to be with. I now realize how lucky I was to find this kind of community early in my academic career, and I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made through AJHA.

You are receiving AEJMC History's Shaw Senior Scholar award for your lengthy record of research excellence in the field. What drives you to remain active in media history research?

We tend to think of historical research as documentary work, but it’s also a process of imagination, and that’s what keeps me invested. To me, historical media are portals to a sense of what it might have been like to live and work during a particular era. I’m also interested in longer-term questions of what media survive or disappear, and which people are remembered or forgotten. These are huge questions we can never fully answer, but they’re compelling. Fortunately, when I was starting out, my doctoral advisor, Patricia Bradley, not only allowed but encouraged me to ask broad questions about cultural history and to take interdisciplinary approaches to exploring them. Her work has been a valuable model for me. Don Shaw’s scholarship also was an inspiring example of wide-ranging curiosity.

What do you believe is the importance of public memory as an area of historical inquiry?

Public memory is a process through which people use ideas about the past in order to make sense of the present. Because this occurs in the present, it also affects the narratives we create to explain the present itself, including judgments about what is “newsworthy” now and should be retained for the future. And this process has occurred in every era, not just our own. So, over time, there is a layered relationship between memory construction and what survives as being seen as historically significant. That is a central concern of memory studies, but also deserves theoretical and methodological consideration in media history scholarship.

How does your professional magazine background influence your research?

I worked on staff at two magazines, McCall’s and Good Housekeeping, that were more than a century old. Among the office artwork were covers created by these magazines’ two most famous cover artists, Neysa McMein and Jessie Willcox Smith, both from the early-twentieth century. I liked those pictures because I liked history, and whenever there was some special feature or anniversary issue “looking back” on earlier eras, I was the one who happily headed down the hall to the room where all the bound volumes were. Those experiences ultimately led me to the subjects of my first two books, one about early-twentieth-century magazine illustration and the other about how current magazines construct historical memory. More generally, of course, my magazine experience inclined me to study magazines, a medium still under-represented in journalism history scholarship. 

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

There are no non-historical subjects. Everything has a history, and we are in history. Whatever the subject, I try to ask “how” and “what if” and “why” questions to encourage students to think about how we ended up with the kinds of media we have, why certain people may have had more of a chance to shape those media, and what other options there might have been … and still could be. Usually those kinds of questions move the subject beyond media and into other aspects of life. With regard to recent events, we can’t help asking, “How could this have happened?” That question, seemingly about the pressing events of the present, opens the door for conversations about the past.

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

Although this is no longer the case, for more than two decades I sang in choruses wherever I was living, and that experience shaped me in many ways. I also love theater, art, and travel, and after the past two years, I will never again take any of them for granted.

by Aimee Edmondson, President

Noted media historian Hazel Dicken-Garcia mentored students in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for 30 years.

Now her name is attached to a new prize that the AJHA plans to award in perpetuity.

This long-time AJHA member and friend bequeathed $22,664 to the organization upon her death in 2018, and the AJHA has been working to raise additional funds to get the total amount to at least $25,000 for the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Student Grant Award to be endowed and yield a fiduciary benefit of up to $1,000 annually. Donations toward the fund may be made here.

With this plan, Dicken-Garcia's generous spirit will live on for generations of media historians. This financial goal is just a start. The AJHA leadership is now researching options for housing and growing the endowment. As more funds are raised, the annual prize money – and number of recipients – would increase along with it. 

The Long-term Planning Committee developed a recommendation for the use of her gift, and the board approved that plan earlier this year. I then appointed an ad hoc Dicken-Garcia Award Committee to create specific language for the award criteria. This committee includes Amy Mattson Lauters, Minnesota State University, Mankato; Jennifer E. Moore, University of Minnesota, Duluth; Kate Roberts Edenborg, University of Wisconsin-Stout; and Yong Volz, University of Missouri.

Lauters knew Dicken-Garcia well as a long-time mentor and friend.

“Hazel Dicken-Garcia mentored many graduate students in her career, and I think she would be happy to know the legacy she left to AJHA will assist young scholars with their research,” Lauters said. “She valued research that added to our understanding of media history, particularly as it relates to the wide variety of diverse cultures and people whose contributions to that history have been understudied. I’m thrilled that this grant will help support future research in her honor.” 

The Dicken-Garcia Award Committee has generated a call that the AJHA leadership plans to release in 2023. Specifically, this research grant is intended to provide financial assistance to students whose work embodies Dicken-Garcia’s scholarly interests in media history. Preference will be given to scholars researching in the following areas: 19th and 20th century journalism standards, equity issues and the media, gender, identity and the media, media and journalism ethics, international communication, Civil War journalism, free expression/First Amendment.

To be eligible for the grant, awardees must be a current AJHA member upon submitting their applications, and they must continue their membership through the grant period. The funds may be used any time during the subsequent 12 months for travel or other research-related expenses, but not for salary.

Many thanks to the Long-Term Planning Committee and the Dicken-Garcia Award Committee for their work on this project. 

Stay tuned to the Intelligencer for updates on this issue. Meanwhile please feel free to reach out to me at edmondso@ohio.edu with any feedback regarding the use of the Dicken-Garcia gift.

The steering committee of the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression invites papers that specifically explore spiritualism and other supernatural themes as they appeared in the 19th century press. Following the 2022 Symposium, we will begin pulling together work for a book, Telling Ghost Stories: Spiritualism and the Supernatural in the 19th Century Press. Conference papers on this theme will be considered for inclusion.

Spiritualism, an important social and religious movement that saw great popularity between the 1840s and the 1920s, began after two young sisters in New York claimed spirits were trying to communicate with them. Their story caught on and so did spiritualism. A little more than decade later the Civil War and its eventual devastation and death increased spiritualism’s popularity among those seeking to reconnect with dead loved ones, including Mary Todd Lincoln. By the late 1890s, it had some 8 million followers between the U.S. and Europe, many of whom were wealthy women of a reform bent. The movement spawned specialty newspapers like The Light published by the London Spiritualist Alliance, the Banner of Light published in Boston, the Spiritualist of London, and others. It also spawned skeptical reactions from journalists and authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and William T. Stead.

Papers may be any methodology and deal with any period within the 19th century. They must keep their focus on how newspapers, magazines or other periodicals covered the spiritualist movement, journalists who were involved in the movement, spiritualist or other religious media that dealt with the subject, or any other topic that focuses on the press and the supernatural.

This call is looking for 19th-century press research on spiritualism or any ghost stories found in the 19th century newspapers. As related topics, any press research on gothic themes where the setting is “desolate or remote” and where the macabre, mysterious, or violent” took place is welcome and encouraged.

Debbie van Tuyll
Professor Emerita
Augusta University

See the full call for the Symposium on the 19th Century Press below:

The steering committee of the thirtieth annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression solicits papers dealing with US mass media of the 19th century, the Civil War in fiction and history, freedom of expression in the 19th century, presidents and the 19th century press, images of race and gender, sensationalism and crime in 19th century newspapers, and the antebellum press and the causes of the Civil War. Selected papers will be presented during the conference Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, November 3–5, 2022. The top three papers and the top three student papers will be honored accordingly.

The Symposium will be conducted via ZOOM (for both speakers and participants). If possible, it will also be conducted in person.

The purpose of the November conference is to share current research and to develop a series of monographs. This year the steering committee will pay special attention to papers and panel presentations on the Civil War and the press, presidents and the 19th century press, news reports of 19th century epidemics, coverage of immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans, and 19th century spiritualism and ghost stories. Since 2000, the Symposium has produced eight distinctly different books of readings: The Civil War and the Press (2000); Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (2007); Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism (2008); Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press (2009); Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting (2013); A Press Divided: Newspaper Coverage of the Civil War (2014); After the War: The Press in a Changing America, 1865–1900 (2017); and The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War (2019). The panel presentations from the 2020 Symposium were recorded and aired on C-SPAN.

The symposium is sponsored by the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Communication Department, the Walter and Leona Schmitt Family Foundation Research Fund, and the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Fund for the Symposium, and because of this sponsorship, no registration fee will be charged.

Papers should be able to be presented within 20 minutes, at least 10–15 pages long. Please send your paper (including a 200–300 word abstract) as a Word attachment to west-chair-office@utc.edu by August 26, 2022.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David Sachsman
George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs, Dept. 3003
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
423-645-5330, david-sachsman@utc.edu
utc.edu/west-chair

by Rob Wells, University of Maryland

There are times when a research project finds you.

That sense of inevitability has been ever present in my work on journalist Willard Kiplinger, creator of the iconic personal finance magazine and political newsletter. It began as a request to write a short entry in American National Biography. I thought a Kiplinger article would complement my existing research on the trade press, and so I contacted the journalist’s grandson and an heir to the publishing enterprise, Knight Kiplinger, to verify a few basic details. That call lasted one and one-half hours.

Had anyone written a book about Willard Kiplinger’s career, I asked? Except for some internal histories, not really, Knight Kiplinger said.

“I have a copy of my grandfather’s unpublished memoirs and an unpublished company history,” Knight Kiplinger told me. “Would you like to see them?”

This story was ready to be told, and I was now in position to do it. Over the next few years, I obtained thousands of documents from the Kiplinger family files and supplemented that with research from the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and other assorted university archives.

I was the first outside historian to examine the inner workings of a publishing enterprise that set a standard for quality personal finance journalism and political reporting for business leaders. The Kiplinger business and personal archives, located in a 19^th century farmhouse outside of Washington, D.C., is a treasure trove of primary source material. I viewed and copied original correspondence between Kiplinger and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Joseph Kennedy, Henry Morgenthau and many others. 

The results of this project, The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street, will be published this fall by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book argues that Kiplinger was an influential player in journalism and politics during the New Deal, a link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. The McKerns Research Grant gave me the resources to help pull this project together, especially during the pandemic.

Initially, I had planned to use the funds for research travel, but the Covid-19 pandemic made that difficult. The funds, however, provided me with the means to acquire documents from archives in other states. I soon realized my research problem was not one of document acquisition but instead one of document synthesis.

I used the funds to hire a talented graduate assistant, Matthew Moore at the University of Arkansas, who helped organize and categorize a significant corpus of material from competing publications, such as Business Week, Fortune, and the business section of The New York Times. Moore helped categorize a fat scrapbook of Kiplinger’s public appearances in the 1920s and 1930s so I could create a data visualization demonstrating the journalist’s influence in the public sphere. The funds allowed me to hire researcher Julie Schapiro, who manages the Kiplinger archives, to conduct a series of highly specialized document searches for business leader correspondence.

This process of synthesis, and discussions with my editor Kathy Roberts Forde, led to some important insights about the role business journalism can play in democracy. I found how Kiplinger helped advance democracy and the rise of modern capitalism by arguing that corporations needed new regulatory structures to curtail their power. Kiplinger’s influential commentary came during the depths of the Great Depression, when the very notion of free markets and the future of capitalism were being questioned. Rather than pander to his business audience, Kiplinger repeatedly told these senior corporate leaders that a new order was in place. Laissez-faire economics was dead, and regulation was necessary, he argued.

I believe this book makes an important contribution to the field of journalism history, and I am very grateful to the American Journalism Historians Association for supporting this work.   

Images

• Willard Kiplinger at typewriter, circa 1930. Photo courtesy Knight Kiplinger.
• A 1931 letter from then-New York Gov. Franklin Roosevelt to Willard Kiplinger. The Kiplinger archives holds original correspondence with political and business leaders. Photo by Rob Wells.
• Willard Kiplinger’s well-used Underwood typewriter. This is one of the many artifacts in the Kiplinger family archives. Photo by Rob Wells.

Rob Wells is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. He received a Joseph McKerns Research Grant in 2020. Applications for 2022 McKerns Grants are due June 15; see the McKerns page for details.

by Mike Conway, First Vice-President

Get ready to dig through your bookshelves and private archives because the AJHA Media History Auction is back! We are resurrecting one of the most popular parts of the AJHA experience for our Memphis conference this September. Just as before, all money raised from the auction goes directly to graduate student conference travel, a major part of the revenue needed for the new Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend.

We are looking for your historic books, newspapers, magazines, and broadsheets. We want your newspaper, radio, television, online and political ephemera--including coffee cups, glasses, calendars, t-shirts, and whatever you are willing to donate to the AJHA auction.  But let’s not stop there. What else do you think someone would bid on to help our graduate students? How about gear from your university? How about products from your town that you can’t get anywhere else? At least one person is thinking about donating a bottle of whiskey from their part of the world.

The new AJHA Auction will be a bit different from the old version, at least for the first year. We are going to list the auction items on an online bidding platform before and during the conference, much like a silent auction. We plan to have the items on display in Memphis (space permitting) and then turn them over to the winning bidders before the end of the conference. So instead of having the auction confined to a couple of hours at the conference, you will be able to look at the auction items online before you get to Memphis. Once you are at the conference, you can see the actual items and keep track of the bidding, finally paying online and receiving your prize at following the AJHA business meeting on Saturday.

Even though we are using an online bidding platform, you do need to physically drop off and pick up all auction items at the AJHA Conference in Memphis. We will not be shipping any auction items.

As soon as you have identified something for the AJHA auction, please take a photo of that item for the auction site. Go to the home page of the AJHA website and you will see a link for the auction. To fill out that form, you will need a photo of the item and a suggested starting bid. We will then create an entry on our online auction site.

Please note that each item will have its own listing on the auction site, so please take a separate photo of each item you plan to donate and fill out a separate form for each item. Forms must be submitted by Aug. 1.

To get you thinking about what you can donate for the AJHA auction, here are a few early entries. Jason Guthrie is offering up a 1976 New Times with Jimmy Carter and Gregg Allman on the cover. Gerry Lanosga is donating journalism media spanning four centuries, including a 1720 London Gazette (pictured), an 1858 Godey’s Lady Book, an 1877 Harper’s Weekly, a 1949 Quick News Weekly, and a 21^st Century page of stamps honoring American journalists including Martha Gelhorn and Eric Sevareid.

The AJHA Memphis Conference is Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, 2022. The deadline for paper and panel submissions is June 1, 2022. Looking for more reasons to join us in Memphis? Here are some of the highlights from AJHA President and former Memphis journalist Aimee Edmondson.

If you can’t make it to Memphis this year, you can always support our graduate students through a donation to the Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend, which is located on the Donate page on the AJHA website. 

This year, we are offering a $400 travel stipend for graduate students on the conference program for Memphis who plan to attend the duration of the conference and agree to work a set number of hours at the registration/auction table. This generous amount is possible because of the money raised from the donation suggestion in Dr. Sweeney’s obituary earlier this year. AJHA has agreed to make up whatever extra money may be needed for 2022. The amount of the travel stipend for 2023 will be dependent on how much money we raise through the auction and the Donate section of our website in Mike Sweeney’s name.

Doctoral student Claire Rounkles of the University of Missouri is our Graduate Student Committee Chairperson, and she is always looking for more graduate students to help out on her committee. You can reach Claire at cmr5xd@mail.missouri.edu.

For more information on the AJHA Auction online site, contact Jason Guthrie at JasonGuthrie@clayton.edu. Other committee members are Gerry Lanosga glanosga@indiana.edu, Michael Fuhlhage michael.fuhlhage@wayne.edu, Erin Coyle erin.coyle0001@temple.edu, and myself mtconway@indiana.edu.