Are exams necessary in a survey course on the history of American journalism?

I asked myself this as I prepared for teaching in the first full semester of the pandemic. I would have 59 students in two classes. They would be freshmen taking their first course in the journalism major. Their transition from high school would be on Zoom.I was so apprehensive that before the fall semester, I reached out to each student individually – via email and then Zoom – to make a connection. I was delighted to see how eager they were.

I dreaded giving timed exams online, especially if students would be ill or in quarantine. I recalled the cramming students do in the days before midterms and finals.  What’s jammed into their brains doesn’t have much of a shelf life.  I wondered if marathons of cramming could be replaced with opportunities each week for students to capture what strikes them as important and do some critical thinking.  What if students could keep journals and use the entries to craft midterm and final essays – with prompts addressing themes of the course?

I decided on Adobe Spark for what I called a “personal learning journal.” Spark makes a simple web page with text and multimedia elements. Students could share the URL with me rather than posting to the open web.  I thought that if I could master Spark in minutes, so could they.

Each week, students got a new prompt.  In the second week, the prompt included this: “Make an entry … on ways that tensions between freedom and repression of the press played out in the time period we are covering this week - from Publick Occurrences to the Partisan Press era. Include a connection you might have made to whether you see these sorts of themes playing out today.”

Although this was not a newswriting class, they did write a research profile of a historical journalist plus several “reflections” on current news stories. These allowed me to help with writing. We talked about “mastery,” and we looked at primary sources to see the evolution of newswriting over time. One journal prompt said, in part, “I would like you to reflect on whether and how any of the material we covered has inspired you or surprised you in any way as you think about your own writing.”  The entries were not graded for writing quality but figured into class participation scores.  I provided individual feedback on the journals every three weeks. And I let students know well ahead what the midterm and final essay prompts would be.

The students took to the journals.  And I could tell in real time what was resonating with them.  I treasure this from one entry after we read Ida Wells: “This queen wrote what she wanted and changed the world...” The same student included this in her entry on the Black press: “Very important moment for me. Inspires me to keep going even though times are tough.”

In the spring, when my students came from many majors, the journals worked just as well.  A theater major wrote: “… having more chances to just explore what I was learning from the course really helped – way more than traditional exams ever could… I also think it helped my writing relax.” A student who plans to be a music teacher wrote: “I have never been so emotionally attached to a school assignment in my life.”

In the end, I am glad the pandemic forced me to rethink how we teach, how students learn and how we assess what they have learned.

Ira Chinoy is the winner of the 2021 National Award for Excellence in Teaching. A Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist with 24 years of experience at four newspapers, Chinoy has been on the faculty at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism since 2001.

The AJHA 40th annual conference is just a few weeks away. We are excited to host the virtual conference on the Whova platform and hope that members will find it to be an enjoyable experience.

A primary reason that we selected Whova was for its networking capabilities, including the following highlights:

• Each attendee can create a profile with a photo and as much or as little information as they like--including a CV for those who are on the job market. This will make it easy for attendees to network with each other.
• Attendees can engage in one-on-one text chats or on the message board, just like bumping into each other in the hallways between sessions.
• Attendees can create one-on-one or small-group video meet-ups, just like going out for a coffee or beer at the conference hotel. We hope that committees, students, and scholars with similar research specialties will take advantage of this feature for interest group confabs during the Saturday morning meeting time.
• Our Historian Speed Meet event on Friday is a special Whova "networking tables" feature that enables attendees to talk with a lot of people in a short span of time, just like mingling at our reception or gala dinner. Attendees are randomly assigned to a virtual table of 3-4 individuals and will be randomly re-assigned at regular intervals over the course of the hour.

Another reason we selected Whova was for its security. The platform is seamlessly integrated with Zoom video conferencing. Each session will be embedded directly into the Whova platform. Only registered attendees will have access, and they will not be able to share the meeting with anyone. Whova's own Q&A feature allows attendees to post questions and comments during the sessions.

Though online, the research paper sessions, panels, and even the virtual historical tour will provide the same enlightening and engaging conference experience AJHA members have come to expect. Check out the schedule and, if you have not registered yet, you can do so through Oct. 6 at this link.

Erika Pribanic-Smith, AJHA Secretary &
Virtual Conference Administrator

Linda Lumsden is the author of Social Justice Journalism: A Cultural History of Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch.

Please introduce yourself and include your connections/role with AJHA. 

I’m Linda Lumsden, and I just retired from the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona, where for 15 years I taught courses in journalism history, journalism ethics, diversity in journalism, and social movement media. Before that I taught for ten years at Western Kentucky University.

I’ve been affiliated with AJHA since I was a graduate student in the 1990s at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’ve found AJHA to be a friendly and nurturing community over the years. I’ve filled just about every role in the organization from presenting papers to serving on the Board of Directors. I’m most honored to have received the Maurine Beasley Award for Outstanding Paper in Women’s History for three consecutive years--a record, I believe. AJHA also has been instrumental in advancing my work by awarding me two Joseph Kerns Research Grants.

What drew you to your topic/time period? 

I’ve been studying advocacy media of the Progressive Era for thirty years. I’m drawn to its producers’ belief in the power of the word and facts as well as their passion for justice. Oftentimes these publications are the best exemplars of the journalistic mission to be a ‘voice for the voiceless.’ I started out as a student looking at how suffragists used the right of assembly to make their case, which of course led me to the suffrage press, particularly Alice Paul’s The Suffragist.

Inez Milholland kept popping up at the head of suffrage parades and, later, as the impetus for the White House pickets after she died while stumping for suffrage in California. Milholland dipped her toes in just about every Progressive movement of the 1910s, so I learned more about socialism, feminism, and other movements as I researched her biography. That led to a full exploration of the prewar radical press in Black, White, and Red all Over (2014).

How did your thinking in the development of your topic start and then lead to this publication? Did it stray? Did you make any sudden and unexpected turns? 

I studied the role of online news media and its “contentious journalism” in opening up political discourse in Malaysia when I was a Fulbright Scholar there during its 2013 election campaign. The connections between print and online advocacy media intrigued me. As were many journalists and scholars at the time, I also was reconsidering the meaning of journalism in the digital era. The Internet spawned a renaissance of what some call ‘activist journalism’ and a reconsideration of the elusive ideal of ‘objectivity.’

People seemed to think activist journalists were born on the Internet, so I wanted to demonstrate their roots in a venerable print culture of dissent that goes back more than a century. As I delved more into current digital mashes of journalism and advocacy, I wrestled with how to characterize the genre. The result was Social Justice Journalism.

As the title indicates, I’m most interested in the aspects of journalistic social movement media, not its propagandizing. I argue facts can be powerful persuaders. To those who say real journalism is neutral, I have two words: Tucker Carlson.

What surprised you most about this project? 

The similarities in functions of 20^th-century social justice journalism in print for with 21^st century digital media. For example, I write about how the Black Lives Matter interactive website Mapping Police Violence, which documented 1,175 police killings in 2014, is a technologically advanced iteration of Ida Wells-Barnett’s documentation of terrorism against African Americans across the South in her 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.

What did you find to be your biggest challenge in working your way to completion of your monograph? 

Conceptualizing and theorizing what actually comprises “social justice journalism.” Negotiating the amorphous lines between journalism and activism remains a challenge. I wrote the conclusion in 2019, when the so-called Trump Resistance Movement was in full swing. I focused on its use of the Internet to spread information, educate citizens, and inspire recruits, but in the end I have to confess its use of media veers more into electoral politics.

As an old print journalist, I found myself vexed by the general lack of print publications at the nexus of current social movements. For example, I questioned whether BLM could survive without at least an online periodical to serve as its institutional memory and maintain movement momentum. Well, I guess the answer is “Yes!”

What are you working on now? 

I just retired, and I spent 2020 coping not only with the COVID pandemic but cancer. I am eager to toss my mask and hop onto my bicycle instead of my laptop. I’m spending the summer visiting family and friends in the Carolinas, Vermont, and Colorado before returning to Tucson in autumn. Hikes, bikes, kayaks, and cocktails figure prominently in my itinerary.

What topic would you like to tackle next? 

After about a year’s sojourn from academia, I might like to return to more popular writing. I’m a big fan of books that combine travel/memoir/natural and cultural history. I’d love to write one.

Of course, I’m also closely observing how social movement media evolves. One of my favorite books this summer was Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism by Alissa Richardson. She does a fantastic job of exploring this form of social movement media.

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I’ve been familiar with AJHA for several years thanks to involved mentors, but I didn’t join until this summer when I finished a paper submission after completing my master’s degree at the University of Georgia.

How did you get into media history?

My junior year at the University of Tennessee, I took a media history course with Ed Caudill. History and media had always respectively been my jam, but it hadn’t ever occurred to me that I could study the history of media. We explored the evolution of American media, and I found myself more drawn to our discussions about Hearst vs. Pulitzer and “The War of the Worlds” than I did inverted pyramid practice.

The next semester, Amber Roessner taught our course on literary journalism. She used historical, cultural, and critical lenses to underpin our class discussions about long-form journalism examples and practice. She couched substantial theory into what seemed like just a fun undergrad writing elective. It wasn’t until halfway through my second semester of graduate school (when I took a deeper dive into research) that I realized how she’d informed the course. She deserves much credit for my career as the first to recognize my interest and passion. She has championed me every step of the way and led me to other great mentors like Janice Hume and Karen Russell.

What is your most recent research about?

The paper I will present in October examines collective memory of the Civil War through newspaper coverage of Confederate symbols, extending my previous work to explore the role of Confederate flags in addition to monuments. The study derives in part from my master’s thesis. In the 1890s and later in the 1920s, Confederate flags and southern flowers served as symbols of goodwill, at least according to oft-quoted political and business power brokers. Organizers attempted to fly the “Conquered Banner” (the Stars and Bars) alongside the United States flag or used flowers in its place as a show of southern pride during unveiling events. I argue newspapers helped to craft the reconciliation narrative that resulted from a white-ruling desire to connect the sections economically, thus contributing to marginalization of minority dissent through potent southern reverence.

Your research mirrors today’s conditions in many ways. Were you inspired by current events, or was it coincidental?

My study actually started as a class research proposal in October 2019, well before the events of Summer 2020. I turned that proposal into my thesis proposal, not knowing how timely it would become. Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the removal of the Richmond, Virginia, Robert E. Lee monument the very day I analyzed initial coverage of its unveiling. The coincidence certainly sparked some reflexive moments to consider: a) history as a conversation between the past and present, and b) my positions on praxis and its future role in my career.

Finally, what hobbies or interests outside of academia do you enjoy?

Southeastern Conference sports dominate many of my weekends. It comes with the territory when you have degrees from two and work at another! Otherwise, you can find me listening to music, watching 60s/70s sitcoms or classic films, shopping, or spending time with friends. I love music and have been a musician for most of my life. I grew up playing piano and singing, and am classically trained in the latter. (Great for living in the Music City)! I also read French novels whenever I can. I double majored in journalism and French as an undergrad, so putting that other muscle to use always feels gratifying. La plus belle langue, à mon avis!

Lexie Little is a former magazine feature writer and sports columnist, now an associate content creator at Vanderbilt University. She is the 2021 recipient of the Robert Lance Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper and the Wally Eberhard Award for the Outstanding Paper on Media and War. She currently serves as Social Media Chair for the AEJMC Magazine Media Division and intends to later pursue her Ph.D. with interests in journalism history and critical and cultural studies.

The American Journalism Historians Association will conduct electronic voting in September to elect a second vice-president and fill three open positions on the Board of Directors. The ballots, which will be emailed to all members, also will include a proposed amendment to the Constitution and Bylaws.

Tracy Lucht and Ken Ward have been nominated for the position of second vice-president. Mark Bernhardt, Erin Coyle, Matthew Pressman, and Yong Volz have been nominated for the board of directors. The electronic ballot will include space for write-in votes.

After elections are held, current Second Vice-President Mike Conway (Indiana University) will become first vice-president for 2021-2022, and First Vice-President Aimee Edmondson (Ohio University) will become president.

Nominees

Second Vice-President

Tracy Lucht is an expert on the history, experiences, and representations of women in the U.S. media. A winner of the National Award for Excellence in Teaching from the American Journalism Historians Association, Lucht teaches courses in writing and reporting for the media, news and feature editing, and journalism history. She has written, co-written or co-edited several books, including The Media in America: A History (Vision Press); Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist (Syracuse University Press); and Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness (Peter Lang). Her latest research is about Amelia Bloomer and early feminist journalism. Lucht previously worked as a copy editor at USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Des Moines Register.

What AJHA means to me: “I owe my professional success to this organization and the people in it, who have given me material and moral support since I joined in 2008. As the overall environment becomes more challenging for us as academics and historians, it will be more important than ever for us to continue to support each other. I am interested in exploring ways to help our group evolve and flourish – and to help our members get the mentoring they need all the way through their careers.”

Ken J. Ward, the 2019 recipient of AJHA's President's Award for Sustained and Exemplary Service, has been involved in AJHA as the Convention Registrar, Graduate Student Chair, and a member of the Board of Directors. He also is chair of AEJMC History Division's teaching committee and co-host of the Journalism History podcast. Ward's research focuses on the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. His research has appeared in top academic journals and received accolades such as AJHA's Robert Lance Memorial Award and the AEJMC History Division's Warren Price Award. Before earning his Ph.D. from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ward was a reporter for the McPherson (Kansas) Sentinel and a sports radio producer for 1410 KGSO in Wichita. He recently joined the Pittsburg State University Department of Communication in Kansas after three years on the faculty at Lamar University (Beaumont, Texas). He teaches courses in journalism and production as well as media history and law.

What AJHA means to me: “AJHA has been my academic home since I was working on my Master's, and I treasure the relationships I've built over these years through the organization. I wouldn't be who I am today without the mentorship and inspiration I've received from AJHA's members, and I'm thankful for that. In return, I've sought to give back wherever possible, be that on the board of directors, as registrar, or through committee work, and I'd be honored to continue serving the organization as its second vice-president.”

Board of Directors

Mark Bernhardt is a professor in the History department at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has served for fourteen years. Prior to that he taught at the University of California, Riverside, for the History department and Women’s Studies department. Mark received his B.A. degree in History from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in History from California State University, Sacramento, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Riverside. He has taught courses on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. History, the American West, Sexuality in the United States, U.S. Media History, and courses examining how films have engaged with a variety of historical social and political issues. His research examines how newspapers, films, and television engage in public discourse about imperialism and its legacy in the transnational North American West, U.S. involvement in wars, social and cultural issues surrounding crime, and the impact of intersectionality in people’s lives.

What AJHA means to me: “I have been a member of the American Journalism Historians Association for five years and currently serve on the History in the Curriculum Committee and editorial board of Historiography in Mass Communication. I have also published in both American Journalism and Journalism History over the years. What has drawn me into this organization is that it serves as a home for scholars in a variety of fields with different perspectives and methodologies who share the common interest of studying History. As someone who works across disciplines, I value what the AJHA does and want to be a part of helping the organization strengthen and grow. Specifically, I support the ongoing advocacy to include Media History as a requirement in the Mass Communications curriculum and building connections with History departments as one means to accomplish this. It is something I have already been working on for the organization and I will continue to do so should I be elected as a member of the board.”

Erin Coyle researches advocacy for free expression, rights to access government information and government proceedings, and conflicts between free expression and privacy rights. Coyle teaches courses in journalism history, media law and ethics, writing and reporting, and theory. She has written a book, The Press and Rights to Privacy: First Amendment Freedoms Vs. Invasion of Privacy Claims. She also has published articles in American Journalism, Journalism History, Historiography in Mass Communication, and Communication Law & Policy. Her latest research focuses on journalists’ coverage of high-profile trials and American newspaper editors’ international advocacy for press freedom during the Cold War era. She has previously served on the AJHA Board of Directors and as the AJHA Research Committee Chair. 

What AJHA means to me: Erin is grateful that AJHA and the organization’s members have played important roles in her professional life since she joined the organization as a graduate student. She values the mentoring, support for research, and promotion of journalism history education the organization and its members consistently provide to students and faculty. As a member of the board, she would like to explore ways the organization could provide more formal mentoring of students and faculty as well as encourage historical scholarship on diverse topics.

Matthew Pressman is an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ. He is the author of numerous journal and mass-media articles and of On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Harvard University Press, 2018). He first joined AJHA as a graduate student in 2013 and currently serves as book review editor for American Journalism and as co-chair of the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference. He received his Ph.D. in History from Boston University and worked as a journalist at Vanity Fair prior to his academic career.

What AJHA means to me: “I would not be where I am in my career today were it not for AJHA. It has provided me, like so many other scholars, with funding opportunities, venues in which to publish and present my work, and access to outstanding research on journalism history and pedagogy. But just as important as those tangible benefits is the sense of belonging to a supportive community of talented scholars. In my experience, AJHA has always been welcoming and inclusive while upholding a commitment to scholarly excellence, and I would be honored to help maintain that tradition as a member of the AJHA board.”

Yong Volz (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is an associate professor and chair of the Journalism Studies faculty at the School of Journalism, University of Missouri. Her research centers on journalists and their place in society and history. Working primarily in the tradition of historical and comparative sociology, her research explores the formation of journalists as a distinctive occupational group, especially concerning gender and social stratification, career path and professional mobility, social movements, and the construction of collective identity. She has examined empirical cases spanning three centuries from both the United States and China. Her oral history project – Herstory – brings to light the experiences of senior women journalists. Volz has received several campus and national awards, including the University of Missouri Alumnae Anniversary Faculty Award, the Outstanding Service Award from Chinese Communication Association, Adviser of the Year from Kappa Tau Alpha National Honor Society, the University of Missouri’s 2020 Jordan Hoyt Tribute to Women Award, and the 2021 Ann K. Covington Award for Mentoring. She is a former head of the AEJMC History Division and served on the advisory board for the Chinese Association for History of Journalism and Communication. She currently serves as Vice-President/President-Elect of the Chinese Communication Association.

What AJHA means to me: AJHA has been a special part of Volz’s academic career. She joined AJHA as a junior faculty member in the late 2000s and benefited from the many meaningful conversations she had with fellow members at the research panels, receptions, and group dinners during the annual conventions. She would like to be involved with AJHA and contribute to a forward-thinking and sustainable future of the organization. With her continuing involvement with other national or international academic and professional organizations, she hopes to help AJHA expand its partnerships and collaborations, promote and increase AJHA’s visibility and impact, and seek ways to better serve the diverse interests and backgrounds of its members.

How did you become involved with AJHA?

I first became involved with AJHA nine years ago as a graduate student presenting at the Raleigh, North Carolina conference. Since then I’ve presented several times as a graduate student and then as a faculty member at Virginia Tech. I served a term on the Board of Directors and have been a reviewer for the paper and research-in-progress submissions. I’ve always felt that AJHA is such a welcoming organization, and it provides a great atmosphere for sharing research and learning new insights into media history.

You were a practicing attorney before entering academia. How did that transition from lawyer to media historian take place?

Prior to becoming an attorney, I received a master's degree at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where I wrote my master's thesis about 19th century American media. After that I went to law school and practiced law, but I always was interested in history and research. As a law student I was a student editor for the Journal of Southern Legal History, which was part of the Georgia Legal History Foundation, so my interest in historical research never waned. In 2011 I decided I wanted to go back to get my Ph.D. and LL.M., a post-graduate law degree, at the University of Georgia and transition my career from lawyer to professor. I ended up writing my dissertation about U.S. public relations history, and I have been writing about PR history and corporate communication history ever since.

You are the Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Communication at Virginia Tech and also teach mainly public relations and communication law courses. How does media history impact your instruction on contemporary communication issues?

I think any time we teach a course in communication we should ground that discussion in history. The past provides context for the present day, and I think there is a great need, especially today, for communication students, whether it be journalism, public relations, or advertising, to understand historical context. It makes them stronger communicators and provides them with broader insight into society.

What hobbies or interests do you have outside academia?

I have a three-year-old daughter, Cayce Anne, so my hobbies have largely been centered around her interests and extra curriculars (swimming, dance, golf, soccer, and school). This summer, my wife, daughter, and I took a golf clinic (different classes) and have taken up the game. I serve on the board of my daughter’s preschool, and have been actively involved in Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) at the local and national levels. I also enjoy doing things around the house, especially cooking and gardening, and, when we get a chance to travel, spending time with my family in Georgia.

Cayce Myers is an associate professor of public relations and director of graduate studies at the Virginia Tech University School of Communication. He currently serves as chair of the AEJMC History Division.

by Teri Finneman, University of Kansas

Sitting at the Library of Congress, I held up the first letter and could feel my brain shifting like it was trying to remember high school calculus.

Except it wasn’t calculus. It was cursive writing. And I was trying to compute a language that I hadn’t used in years.

Discussions (and K-12 debate) about cursive writing have been going on for years. But during my trip to Washington to finally use my 2019 McKerns Grant, I found myself feeling a twinge of fear. Not scary fear, but vanishing culture fear.

After prior archive trips, I often would need to have my mom or my grandma help me read some cursive writing that I brought back. But this trip was worse than usual.

Some of it, I’m sure, is pandemic brain of trying to re-enter society in general. I used to know D.C. so well, yet I found myself making some wrong turns at times as I reacquainted myself with being outside of a Covid bubble and being back in reality.

But I’m also a Millennial. I spend 16 hours a day on a laptop or phone. My grandma died four years ago, essentially erasing all cursive writing exposure in my life now that I no longer receive her letters.

So as I sat in the manuscript room, I felt good looking at Grace Coolidge’s letters. I had to sit and think about Mary Lincoln’s (shown here) and knew that my mom was going to have to help with some of the words.

But Angelica Van Buren’s? I was so overwhelmed looking at that horrible faded brown ink cursive writing that I didn’t even take a single picture of it. Not a single word of it computed in my fuzzy brain.

I put the folder away quickly and moved on. But then I felt a massive amount of guilt for the next two days. If I, a first ladies researcher, was giving up that easily on Angelica, who would ever tell her story?

I wish I could say that I went back and tried again or at least took a picture. But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself wishing I could somehow take a class in historical cursive writing. And I find myself wondering what’s going to happen with Generation Z and the next generation of historians. Will we one day get to a point when few know how to read these materials?

The thought of that weighed heavily on me as I typed this sitting at Reagan airport. What can we do about this? Do we need to have a session at AJHA where there are a bunch of letters and a group of us Millennial and Gen Z scholars are put in a room while more senior faculty help us re-learn how to read cursive writing that we’ve barely used since fifth grade? I, for one, would gladly attend that session ASAP.

Maybe it’s just a matter of self-practice. Maybe I need to just pull up more digitized letters and get my brain used to seeing that language again. I’d be curious to know your tricks for reading historical writing and may need to get a Facebook conversation going on it.

Meanwhile, for those wondering about archive visits during a pandemic, the Library of Congress requires a special appointment to go under its Covid protocols. A limited number of people are allowed inside and are only guaranteed a half-day appointment each day. I made my appointment four weeks before going and opted for morning shifts. We could check to see if there were any afternoon openings once we got there, but there weren’t. They were full.

Once there, it felt very safe inside with all of us spread out and everyone required to wear a mask. From there, operations were fairly normal. I didn’t have any Covid safety concerns at all inside the building.

However, masking from tourists at my hotel was hit or miss despite being required. The same was true for a portion of men in the airport terminals. So that was the most pressing concern of archive travel and the predominant concern for any other historians to weigh as they determine whether to get back to the archives.

by Amy Lauters, Minnesota State University, Mankato

When I saw the coffin filled with copies of a working-class newspaper at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, England, the entire scope of the research project I’d gone to the United Kingdom to uncover changed.

The project started life as a proposed examination of how the Guardian had grown from its Manchester roots to become a national and international voice, and to what extent the Guardian played a role in building a community for its readers. The community-building function of media remains a keen interest of mine, and the McKerns grant I received from AJHA in 2018 provided me some of the funds I needed to take the trip to the U.K. to continue research in this area and lay the groundwork for future research.

However, when a friend suggested I visit the People’s History Museum on my first day in Manchester, those initial plans sharply diverged, as the newspaper in the coffin became my primary interest.

According to the plaque next to the coffin, the newspaper, called the Poor Man’s Guardian, had been illegal and regularly smuggled about the country in coffins of this kind in an attempt to keep the bearer from being jailed and fined for possessing it.

Several bits of that short story immediately piqued my interest: First, the word “illegal” applied to “newspaper” nearly guaranteed that I’d take note. Second, the lengths to which the publishers and readers of the paper apparently went to connect suggested to me a level of commitment that needed further exploration. And third, I immediately wondered if the Poor Man’s Guardian had any relationship at all to the current national Guardian.

The third question was easily answered with a trip to the museum’s front desk, where a helpful attendant directed me to the museum’s basement and its gorgeous newspaper archive. The archivist showed me the bound copies of the Poor Man’s Guardian, which was entirely separate from the original Manchester Guardian. The museum also houses an excellent selection of books about the press and labor history in Britain, which proved to be valuable in contextualizing the rest of the story I was beginning to untangle.

The timing of my visit was fortuitous; many organizations in the city of Manchester had begun rolling out events to commemorate the Peterloo Massacre, a protest for universal suffrage that ended in bloodshed in 1819. The Manchester paper was founded shortly after it, and I already had established that the Manchester paper had evolved into the national Guardian. (While an office remains in Manchester, its primary offices were moved to London in the mid-20^th century. I visited both while I was in the U.K.) The rise of the Unstamped newspapers has its roots in Peterloo, as one government response to that event was to re-impose the newspaper stamp, making it economically challenging to produce and to purchase newspapers as well as requiring content to be pre-approved.

While none of the newspapers in the museum’s collection were digitized, I was given permission to go through them in the archive’s reading room and to digitize the copies I wanted to take myself, for a small fee per day. I quickly found myself sucked into the 19^th century, reading week after week of the Poor Man’s Guardian and learning about a working-class community that was agitating for political change. The community had an underground network of distributors of the paper, which was Unstamped and therefore illegal.

The publisher of PMG, Henry Hetherington, got arrested and imprisoned three times during the paper’s run for the crime of publishing the paper. His editor, James Bronterre O’Brien, published in Hetherington’s stead, raising funds to replace presses that had been seized, coaxing readers to send in the minutes from their union meetings, publishing letters from readers incensed over numerous issues, including Hetherington’s imprisonment, and publishing a list, at the back, of all who had subscribed or contributed to the bail fund that had been set up. O’Brien also published notices looking for men without ties to distribute the paper, promising that if they were caught, their fines would be paid from the fund.

Hetherington and O’Brien rarely used bylines in the paper itself, and it would have been foolish to do so given the illegality of the work. Neither did they specify many of the techniques they used to distribute the paper, and again, it would have been foolish to do so. Some of the tales told now no doubt have roots in oral history that will never be verified.

The Poor Man’s Guardian also provides an example of a newspaper that folded once its purpose had been fulfilled. It had been founded to agitate for an appeal to the Stamp Act, as well as to provide a forum for working-class activists who were seeking universal suffrage, unionization, and representation. According to the editors, once the Stamp Act had been repealed, it was no longer as popular, and it no longer made enough money to sustain itself. PMG folded in 1836, and Hetherington and O’Brien moved on to other projects and publications. The publication itself is cited by British Labour scholars as a cornerstone of Labour Party movement.

My experiences traveling with the McKerns Grant provided an object lesson in the value of actually visiting archives and historic sites, rather than relying exclusively on digital archives. The work I’d intended to do became derailed by a story seldom told in the United States. And yet, that story opened up several new directions for research and questions about the nature of a free press and its development in the United States as opposed to Great Britain that could prove fruitful for future study. Certainly, the image of the newspapers in the coffin will never leave me.

Visit the People’s History Museum online if you can’t make it to Manchester in person: https://phm.org.uk

All images courtesy of Amy Lauters. From the top: interior of the People's History Museum; front page of The Poor Man's Guardian; a printing press at the museum.

Lauters also did video diary posts to send home to her family during her trip. The below clip is a from a visit to John Rylands Library:

The AJHA Board of Directors is proposing an amendment to the Constitution and Bylaws, changing the title of the organization's Administrative Secretary to Executive Director to better reflect the scope of the office’s duties.

Board member Teri Finneman proposed the change, indicating that "secretary" is a dated term that does not encompass the full level of workload involved with the position. Executive Director is the title used by people who do the same duties at other organizations, making AJHA an outlier.

In February, the board voted unanimously to place the amendment on the fall ballot for a member vote. 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 by electronic ballot before the virtual convention scheduled for Oct. 8-9.

The amendment would change the title wording only. The title would be changed everywhere in the Constitution and Bylaws where the Administrative Secretary is mentioned. See this copy of the Constitution and Bylaws with those locations highlighted.

Voting will occur via electronic ballot in September, along with the election for Second Vice-President and Board of Directors. Members will receive a link to the ballot via email.

 

By Kimberly Voss

With the fall semester starting, it’s time to look at which people and which media are included in our journalism history classes. Are we relying too much on textbooks that highlight the mainstream, and in the process, are we overlooking marginalized communities in our classes? NYU has a Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard that is helpful in examining a syllabus and curriculum for diversity and inclusion, which is available online through the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. If you decide you can do more, then providing students access to these materials is not difficult as there are numerous archives with scanned materials for students to explore.

One of my favorite digital archives is the U.S. Caribbean and Ethnic Florida Digital Newspaper Project. It is a collaborative project between the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, the library system at the University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras, and the University of the Virgin Islands. Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the project offers digitized versions of ethnic and Caribbean newspapers, which are available through the National Digital Newspaper Program.

The collection also has articles based on topics, including the Bubonic Plague, the Armenian Genocide during World War I, and the presidential election of 1920. There are also sections regarding feminism in the early 20th century Puerto Rican press.

Another great resource within the project is the digitized version of Diario las Américas. The newspaper focused on coverage of local events, as well as news from across the state. It included a recurring news section “La Voz de Tampa” (The Voice of Tampa), which featured news directly from the paper’s Tampa office. There are about 15,000 pages covering November 1953 through December 1960 that are text-searchable in Chronicling America. 

Also found in the project is the Southern Jewish Weekly, which began publication in 1939 when editor Isadore Moscovitz merged the Florida Jewish News and the Jewish Citizen to create a new newspaper that would be “an independent weekly serving American citizens of Jewish faith.” The newspaper was published in Jacksonville, Florida, once a week, with issues typically being eight pages. While Isadore was away serving in World War II, his wife, Mrs. Ethel “Teddy” Moscovitz, managed the paper and served as its editor in the interim. The paper continued as a monthly until January 1947 when Isadore returned to the United States.

An excellent collection of newspaper’s women’s pages are also contained in the project. As the collection notes, an examination of the women’s section in the Pensacola Journal reveals a portrait of the social calendar in the city. (The project has digitized versions of the Journal spanning from January 1905 to December 1914.) There were the traditional reports of weddings, births, and deaths, but also columns reporting illnesses, birthday parties, and club meetings. The social events found on the “People and Events” page typically contained a paragraph or more. For example, a 1909 “Society” column included four paragraphs about Miss Victorine Kroenberger, “a beautiful young Pensacola girl” who left home to “enter the Convent of the Holy Cross at Notre Dame” in order to become a nun.

One of the newspapers in the digital collection is the Ocala Evening Star, published from 1895-1943 before joining with the Ocala Banner to form the Ocala Star-Banner. From Jan. 28, 1902 to Feb. 24, 1908, the paper regularly dedicated space for local African American news, even though it was published by a white owner. Known as the “Colored Folks Column” from 1902 to 1903 and the “Colored People’s Department” from 1904 until it ended, it provided insight into African American life in the community and contained notices about illness and recovery, wedding news, deaths, and the availability of lodging and property.

The most important news to any community, just like politics, is local. Don’t be afraid to bring community and regional voices into your history curriculum. Direct access to primary source material, made possible through these digital archives, is instrumental to creating an inclusive environment.

Kimberly Voss is a professor at the  University of Central Florida