by Mike Conway, AJHA First Vice President 

It will be no surprise to those who knew Dr. Michael S. Sweeney of Ohio University that one of his final acts before passing away on January 15 involved helping graduate students pursue their interest in journalism and media history as well as finding a home in AJHA. 

We’ll start with the renewed initiative to help graduate students reduce the cost of attending our conference and then explain how Dr. Sweeney helped make it happen. 

$400 Graduate Student Travel Stipend. The Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend will provide $400 to graduate students who have a paper accepted and attend our 2022 AJHA Conference in Memphis in September. Student who are on conference panels or have their research-in-progress work accepted for presentation also will be eligible. In exchange for the $400 stipend, students will agree to attend the full conference and work a set number of hours to help with conference logistics. We will be setting up a registration process for eligible students who would like to receive the stipend.

Return of the AJHA Auction. Many of us first “experienced” Mike Sweeney through his yearly role as the auctioneer for the AJHA conference media history auction. After the silent bidding was complete, Mike got on the microphone and encouraged, shamed, cajoled, and used any method necessary to get us to bid higher on all of the items, always reminding us the money was given directly to grad students. By the end of the night, many of us had stacks of books, historic newspapers, trinkets, glasses, and other random items connected to journalism history that we didn’t know we needed. One of my favorite memories was when Mike was able to create a bidding war for a half-eaten ham sandwich that someone had left on an auction table.  

We are reviving the AJHA Conference auction for two reasons. First, the auction did raise money for graduate student travel. But maybe just as important, the auction created a space during the conference where graduate students and other new members could get to know members of AJHA away from the panel and paper presentations.   

The format for the renewed auction is still under discussion. We may not have the space necessary for the traditional Friday night auction event at our Memphis hotel. If not, we will conduct a silent auction that could run through much of the conference, keeping the items near the presentation rooms to allow people more time to bid. We may even reserve some top items for a short live auction during the Saturday Closing Gala, depending on our meeting space. 

No matter what the format, it’s time to start searching your journalism history collection for items that we can auction off for graduate student travel funds.  

Mentorship. The other piece of this initiative to help our graduate students involves a renewed commitment and new ways to help our graduate students succeed in their historical research and in navigating the world of academia. Many of us were drawn to AJHA as graduate students because of the way we were treated at AJHA compared to other academic conferences. I still remember senior members of AJHA that would stop me in the hallway to ask me about a research presentation or even just say hello. They seemed genuinely interested in my research and my hopes for an academic career. My first book and many of my research articles were directly a result of help from AJHA members at the conference. Our AJHA members still have that giving and inclusive spirit, so we want to find more ways to connect professors with graduate students. 

One of our ideas that we hope to set in motion this spring is one or a few Zoom sessions featuring AJHA members speaking on topics of interest for graduate students. We hope the timing could encourage them to submit their research for the AJHA Memphis conference. We could make these Zoom sessions year-round depending on interest. 

We also want to increase our efforts to make graduate students feel welcome at our conference and in our organization. We’re working on ways to connect graduate students who will be coming to Memphis so they can meet other students and faculty who will be at the conference. 

The enduring legacy of Dr. Michael S. Sweeney. This initiative began when AJHA President Aimee Edmondson appointed a temporary committee last fall to look into ways to recruit and retain graduate students for AJHA. She asked Claire Rounkles (Missouri; AJHA Graduate Student Committee Chair), Michael Fuhlhage (Wayne State), Gerry Lanosga (Indiana) and me to come up with some ideas. 

When we first considered the idea of bringing back the auction, I was in touch with some of the people who had been involved in the past, including Mike Sweeney. He provided important background and insight into the AJHA auction for us.  

We all know Mike’s commitment to students--not only those he directly mentored at Utah State and Ohio University, but also all of the students he has encouraged through his work at AJHA and as editor of Journalism History. He is also a role model for all of us in AJHA for his prolific and important scholarship over the years. In the past decade, he has taught us a master class in how to live with terminal cancer. His acceptance speech for the 2015 Kobre Award in Oklahoma City was a moment I will never forget.     

As we were working on these graduate student initiatives, we learned Mike was close to death. Aimee Edmondson and I talked about the strong connections between Mike, AJHA, and graduate students. We came up with the idea of naming the stipend after him. Mike’s wife Carolyn was able to talk to Mike about the idea during his final week and they were both enthusiastic about the opportunity. They even made it a point to encourage donations to the AJHA Graduate Student Travel Fund in his obituary.   

On February 17, the AJHA Board voted to rename the fund The Michael S. Sweeney Graduate Student Travel Stipend as well as to provide one-time seed funding to guarantee the $400 stipend for the Memphis conference. The amount of future stipends will depend on how much we can raise through donations to the Sweeney Stipend fund as well as AJHA auction proceeds.  

Because of the decision by Mike and Carolyn Sweeney to include AJHA in his obituary, we already  have received more than $4000 to help fund the travel stipend for Memphis. 

Of course, these initiatives only will work if we can find members willing to help us with the auction and mentorship plans as well as help raise money for the Sweeney Stipend. The ad hoc committee has agreed to work on the auction for 2022, and then we can hopefully come up with a plan to keep it going beyond Memphis. If you would like to help us with any of these initiatives, please get in touch with any member of our committee: Michael Fuhlhage, Gerry Lanosga, Claire Rounkles, or Mike Conway.

by Jon Marshall, Northwestern University

My fascination with the presidency was born at age five during the summer of 1968 when my family went on vacation to San Diego. Richard Nixon, fresh from winning the GOP presidential nomination, was staying at a hotel a couple of miles down the beach from us. My dad, never one to be shy, decided my brother and I should meet Nixon. We hiked across the sand to Nixon’s hotel and stationed ourselves outside the entrance. When Nixon walked by, my dad greeted him, and the soon-to-be president graciously walked over and shook our hands. 

My interest in the presidency deepened a few years later as I learned about Nixon becoming ensnared in the Watergate scandal. My mom and I spent the summer of 1973 watching the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee hearings on television. The next summer we watched Nixon resign as I wondered how this powerful man could have such a steep downfall. 

Fast forward to 2017. The recently elected Donald Trump was shattering every norm in the relationship between presidents and the press. He was using Twitter to bash journalists, calling them enemies of the people, and threatening them with violence. Much of the media was fractured along deeply partisan lines. I wanted to know, “How did we get here?”  

To find an answer, I began the research that resulted in my second book, Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis (Potomac Books, 2022). I had already satisfied some of my Nixon fascination with my first book, Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse. This time I wanted to take a broader look at the history of presidents and the press during some of the nation’s tensest moments.  

Clash has the dual aim of providing knowledge that will be useful to historians while also appealing to students and other readers who are interested in government, politics, and the media. I chose ten presidents (John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump) who encountered severe crises and whose relationships with the press tell us something important about how we arrived at our current toxic media environment. By exploring this history, Clash seeks to identify what was truly unprecedented about Trump’s relationship with journalists.  

I began by reading the many outstanding books, articles, and papers that other scholars have produced on the presidency and the history of the Washington press corps. During the AJHA conference in Dallas, I was able to visit the archives at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and found fascinating material about his efforts to woo conservative radio hosts. However, like other scholars trying to conduct research in the age of COVID, I was soon limited in the number of physical archives I could visit. Fortunately, the cavalry of digital resources came to the rescue. I found a bounty of online primary sources in presidential archives, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Internet Archive. I examined White House and congressional documents, speeches, public opinion polls, letters, oral histories, memoirs, and much more.  

One of my researching joys was using America’s Historical Newspapers, Gale’s Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, NewsBank, ProQuest, and Readex’s African American Newspapers series to find and analyze articles, editorials, and cartoons in more than six dozen newspapers and magazines stretching back to the 1790s. In addition, I used clips and transcripts available from the C-SPAN Executive Branch Archive and Vanderbilt Television News Archive. For the Trump and Obama years, I also sifted through collections of social media posts. 

One of my biggest challenges was sifting through this rich material to determine what to include within my publisher’s 90,000-word limit. I had to ignore some presidents (sorry about that, Millard Fillmore fans), and there was a lot more I could have written about each president who appears in Clash. In the end, I cut twice as many words as I included.  

Based on my research, Clash highlights eight main themes: 

• Presidents have frequently attacked, restricted, manipulated, and demonized the press to strengthen their own positions.  

• Using new technology, presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have boosted their power by avoiding the White House press corps and communicating directly to the public.  

• Presidents who developed respectful relationships with the press have had more long-term success than those who didn’t.  

• Journalists who advocated for political and social movements have pushed presidents to dramatically change their policies. 

• Despite their own mistakes and formidable forces trying to hinder them, reporters often have courageously served the public when covering the White House.  

• Starting with Reagan, policy changes have led to a surge in partisan, divisive media content that widened polarization. 

• Faith in democracy has been undercut by presidents and their media allies who spread conspiracy theories and other lies. 

• The news media’s economic woes have weakened its ability to hold presidents accountable.
  

I had the most fun writing about the moments that bring the relationship between presidents and the press to life: Adams stomping on his wig out of frustration, Lincoln chatting amiably with Frederick Douglass, Wilson lecturing the White House press corps as if they were dimwitted schoolboys, Roosevelt and Edward R. Murrow discussing World War II over sandwiches and beer deep into the night, the inept Watergate burglars accidentally locking themselves inside a banquet room, George H.W. Bush carrying Rush Limbaugh’s luggage into the White House, and Trump studying printed copies of his first tweets to learn which words sparked the most controversy.  

Before completing Clash, I faced one final challenge. I thought it was important to include the Trump presidency, and so I had negotiated an early 2021 deadline with my publisher, figuring I could wrap the book up quickly after the November 3 election. But then Trump refused to concede, leading to the bloody January 6 insurrection. I scrambled to include at least a rough draft of that history and the role some media played in America’s descent into political madness.  

Clash ends with Joe Biden’s inauguration. Coincidentally, Biden is the other president I’ve met. When my family was visiting Boston in the fall of 2007, my wife, Laurie, spotted Biden coming out of a restaurant. Like my dad with Nixon nearly 40 years earlier, I shouted a greeting to Biden. He came over and chatted with us for about five minutes, asking our three young sons all about their lives. Who knows, maybe someday one of them will want to write about presidents too.

Melissa Greene-Blye is an assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. She worked for 20 years as an anchor and reporter covering local news in television markets big and small. A former chair of AJHA's Graduate Student Committee, Greene-Blye currently serves as co-chair of the Membership Committee. She has presented research at the AJHA annual conference as well as the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA? 

I first became involved with AJHA while still a graduate student at Tennessee. I had taken a historical methods course from Dr. Amber Roessner, and she encouraged me to submit that paper to the 2016 AJHA annual conference. To my surprise and delight, it was accepted and I have been attending and involved in AJHA ever since. 

What do you believe is the importance of studying journalistic representations and negotiations of American Indian identity? 

A central theme of my work is the importance of connecting the past with the present. Coverage of Native issues, individuals, and identity continues to fall prey to a legacy of  misrepresentation established by long ago editors and reporters; if we can understand the historical roots of that misleading representation, we stand a much better chance of improving coverage of Native issues, individuals, and identity in today’s journalism. As for studying negotiations of Native identity, there are two key points: First, is understanding that Native nations and individuals did not always have access to their own press, so we often have to look into the silences in the historical record and be open-minded in using non-traditional sources of information in order to fully understand how Native nations were seeking to be heard and understood by the press of their day. Second, is understanding the purpose of the work Native news outlets were doing in a particular period. This requires a broader research perspective that goes beyond a mere textual analysis of the journalistic content produced by those outlets and which also includes an understanding of tribal culture and politics. 

Your professional career was largely in broadcast news. What intersections are there between your professional experience and your historical research agenda? 

That is a great question and one I am still coming to understand myself. I often joke that I am like the circus rider who is standing atop two moving horses while simultaneously keeping those horses moving forward together at a steady pace. Two new endeavors are allowing me to use my professional broadcast experience and multimedia teaching experience to educate the next generation of Native journalists: First, I am on the executive team that is launching a Native Media Storytelling Workshop for Indigenous high school students this summer hosted by the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Second, I am helping produce a news segment for a newly launched streaming news and information program titled Good Morning Indian Country. My KUJH student news team will be contributing content to this program which also allows me to teach those students about best practices when covering Indian Country. 

How does your historical research influence your teaching? 

I find that my historical research and grounding informs any course I teach in the field of journalism and mass communication because I believe it is essential to connect the past with the present in order to have a well-rounded perspective on what it means to be a media practitioner, whether your field is journalism or strategic communication. In this moment when we as a nation are grappling with questions around social justice and the meaning of authentic equality, understanding the role media has played historically and continues to play in the present moment around creating popular memory and shaping public discourse has never been more crucial. My historical perspective offers an opportunity to teach students how to seek out and include marginalized and underrepresented voices in their work in a way that is authentic and fully formed. 

What can you tell us about any current research projects? 

I am currently working on a project with Dr. Teri Finneman using Indigenous Standpoint Theory as a platform to examine how Native news outlets have covered Interior Secretary Deb Haaland from her nomination into the current moment with an eye toward comparing that coverage with Haaland’s representation in non-Native news outlets. Also in progress, a book chapter covering the history of the Native press, and lastly, a project examining how three key Native women who did not have their own press platform were able to use the established press to further their advocacy of issues around Native health, education, and political autonomy. 

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

Wait, am I allowed to have those as a pre-tenure faculty member? Kidding. Seriously though, I spend as much time as I can attending tribal events in Miami, Oklahoma so that I can continue growing my knowledge about our Myaamia culture, history, and language, an interest I love sharing with my daughter. I am also a voracious reader and almost always have one scholarly, one non-fiction, and one fiction book in progress. Beyond that, my dogs require a lot of attention and petting, demands I indulge unbegrudgingly on a daily basis.

Mike Sweeney (third from the right) with current and former Ohio University graduate students at the 2018 AJHA conference, where Sweeney received the National Award for Excellence in Teaching.

by Erika Pribanic-Smith, AJHA Executive Director and Interim Intelligencer Editor

Over the past 38 years, an Ohio University graduate seminar has been responsible for bringing dozens of students to AJHA—many of whom have become faculty members and brought their own students to the conference.

Pat Washburn developed the historical research class and taught it for the entire time that he was at Ohio University (1984-2012). He said he modeled the course after a seminar he took with David Nord as a doctoral student at Indiana University.

Washburn incorporated lessons he learned from reading papers presented at conferences and listening carefully to the critiques of the papers. 

“After doing that for three years, I basically knew what errors to avoid,” Washburn said. “As a result, throughout my entire academic career, I only had one paper rejected at a meeting.”

To help his graduate students learn how to do--and write--historical research successfully, Washburn required them to read three historical papers that had been given at conferences for every class meeting. He carefully chose papers that had flaws so the class could discuss them and learn what not to do.

Washburn also required his students to conduct their own historical research using primary and secondary sources. At the end of the course, students would get one of their peers’ papers by blind draw to critique. Ultimately, all but 10 percent of the course grade was based on the research paper and peer critique. 

“The success of the class was shown by the fact that from 1985 to 2012, 91 papers from the class were given at academic meetings (mostly AEJMC and AJHA), and 24 became journal articles,” Washburn said. “I was proud of those numbers.”

A former student of Washburn’s, Mike Sweeney picked up the course in 2012 and continued the success Washburn had. Sweeney's driving philosophy was that historiography is easy and fun. Convincing students of this meant ensuring their success in the class, he said.

Sweeney reduced the weight of the research paper to 60 percent of the course grade so he would not “‘freak out’ students by having the final paper count overmuch.” Furthermore, it was important to Sweeney that students receive feedback early in the course, particularly on Chicago Style. Therefore, a five-page paper worth 100 points (10 percent of the final grade) was due about three weeks into the term. This gave students the opportunity to see how Sweeney marked papers.

The assignment involved looking for examples of the inverted pyramid in primary documents: news stories from 1865, 1875, 1885, and 1895 that students could view in hard copy at libraries or electronically using resources such as newspapers.com. Sweeney chose that time frame because the start of the inverted pyramid generally is said to be the wire story of the telegram Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sent to the commanding general in New York City regarding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. By giving students this assignment, rather than immediately cutting them loose to research anything in any period, Sweeney helped students learn the importance of selecting a research timeline and a rationale for that timeline.

Like Washburn, Sweeney felt it was important to give students an understanding of what historiography is. They would learn this from reading how to do it, reading professional examples of it (including Sweeney’s own work), and getting feedback on their own research from him and their classmates. He adopted Washburn’s assignment of critiquing a peer’s research paper selected by blind draw, and he added a short paper critiquing an anonymous research paper that Sweeney selected.

Ultimately, Sweeney aimed to ensure that students produced a publishable, high-quality academic research paper about a mass communication history topic. Sweeney specifically wanted students to produce a paper that they could present at AJHA or AEJMC, which he relayed to them at the outset of the course. His goal in getting students published was to show them how easy it is to keep on publishing because teaching is, as he told them, a “good gig.”

Sweeney said his students “blew out the field” in terms of published papers. In one year, he noted, seven grad students from the program at Ohio presented a paper or research in progress at the AJHA conference.

AJHA President Aimee Edmondson now is the lone historian in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism after the retirements of Washburn and Sweeney as well as fellow AJHA members Joe Bernt, Ellen Gerl, and Marilyn Greenwald. Edmondson will be teaching the historical methods course, which is open both to master’s and doctoral students.

She said she would maintain the focus on students producing publishable research papers. Her updates would include incorporating more of how historians use theory. Edmondson aims to “break down the silos” by showing how scholars use other disciplines to study history, including critical cultural studies, social history, environmental communication, law, political science, and African American studies.

“I think that would be the way I would do it, while keeping the best of what Mike and Pat did,” she said.

Edmondson routinely teaches the undergrad history course. The primary difference is that the undergraduate class involves lecturing to students on history topics whereas the graduate class involves students learning history through the process of learning how to do history.

Furthermore, the undergraduate course is about six times larger than the graduate seminar. The smaller size of the seminar allows for individual coaching.

"There's a lot of working with students one-on-one to help them come up with a topic and then how to best approach it," Edmondson said.

Jennifer Moore is an associate professor in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her work on the nineteenth century illustrated press has appeared in media history journals and edited collections. A former co-coordinator of the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, Moore is a member of the AJHA Board of Directors and coordinator of the organization's media literacy efforts.

When and how did you first become involved in AJHA?

My first AJHA conference was in San Antonio as a graduate student in 2005. I was invited to present on a panel about online resources for scholars. My presentation focused on visual materials (e.g. cartoons, photojournalism, graphic design). I remember the experience fondly. It was a lively session where senior scholars had a lot of questions about using online databases and visual culture. It was a nice introduction to the supportive environment AJHA has proven to be for many early scholars. Remembering this also makes me feel a little old! Who can imagine doing research without the use of online resources today? 

I also remember being pleasantly surprised when I was handed a check to offset my travel expenses. I hope our organization can continue supporting the next generation of scholars. Every penny counts!

You've been heavily involved in the Symposium for the 19th Century, Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression. What draws you to that era of history?

Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia first introduced me to the endlessly fascinating world of nineteenth century journalism. Dicken-Garcia advised my Master's thesis at the University of Minnesota, and I continued working with her during my Ph.D. studies. I would not be the scholar I am today without her guidance and enthusiasm about studying the past. I see so many fascinating parallels between journalism innovations in the nineteenth century and today's media ecosystem. Studying the past is like time travel, and it keeps me curious. Nineteenth century artifacts offer endless possibilities for new knowledge. It's such a joy to make new connections to the past, and it happens often enough to keep me returning to this time period. I also find the community of nineteenth-century scholars to be the best colleagues one could hope for.

How does your historical scholarship influence your teaching of modern topics like digital storytelling and social media?

I strive to make connections to past media practices to contextualize social, political and economic issues facing journalism and media today. For example, it's always fun to introduce students to "fake news" in the nineteenth century and use history to reflect on misinformation and how it spreads on social media. The differences and similarities always spark thoughtful discussions with my students about power, audiences, and media as social institutions. 

What do you feel is the importance of media literacy to the study of media history?

That is a great question and one that I continue to ask. The recent challenge to the democratic process by way of mob violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, is the wake up call we all needed to make media literacy a more urgent matter.  An understanding of media history can help empower citizens to know when politicians are abusing their elected positions for personal gain. It's trite, but apt, to say if we don't know our past we're doomed to repeat it. As an organization, I'd like to consider how AHJA members can serve the communities where they work and live. For example, I am speaking on a panel to the League of Women Voters of Duluth in January 2022 about media literacy. I'm also excited to be working on this with AJHA President Aimee Edmondson, who is making media literacy a priority of her presidency this year. We hope to come up with some actionable steps for our members to do in their communities on this topic.

What can you tell us about what you've been working on during your sabbatical?

I am revisiting a research area that I've put aside that looks at public health, journalism, and visual culture. By the time I return to the classroom in Fall 2022 I hope to have a book contract in hand. Wish me luck! 

I've also taken advantage of this time to do some skill-building. I had the opportunity to take a documentary film workshop from an international award-winning documentarian in Duluth last fall. It was a terrific experience, and I look forward to bringing what I learned back to the classroom as well as in community-engaged research projects.

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

I do my best to embrace the outdoors. I love a brisk walk or a long bike ride and hope to start running again after recovering from an injury. Living where I do, I also take advantage of the snow and cold. I like to snowshoe and cross country ski a few times a season. I began knitting a few years ago and that continues to be a source of solace. Live music is also a passion of mine; the pandemic has made that a bit of a challenge, but I attend shows when it feels safe.

The August 1994 Intelligencer included preview columns and
the full program for the Roanoke conference. Click here to view the full PDF.

by Erika Pribanic-Smith, Executive Director and Interim Intelligencer Editor

Last month, AJHA President Aimee Edmondson shared her AJHA “origin story” and urged other members to share theirs. Comments in the AJHA Facebook group revealed that several members first attended at the 13th annual conference, best remembered for disco dancing at the conference hotel and a tour bus that broke down outside a dive bar.

The late Sam Riley led the planning for the conference, which took place Oct. 6-8, 1994, at the Airport Marriott in Roanoke, Virginia. His August 1994 Intelligencer column previewing the conference emphasized two main speakers and a field trip.

Keynote speakers were Donald Ritchie, associate Senate librarian, who spoke on the history of the Washington press corps, and Eric Newton, founding managing editor of the now-defunct Newseum, which was under construction in Arlington, Va., at the time of the conference.

The annual historic tour took visitors on a one-hour drive to Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s getaway home, and a return trip via the Blue Ridge Parkway. In his Intelligencer preview, Riley wrote, “By early October, nature should have cooperated by turning the mountain leaves all sorts of pretty colors.”

John Coward, who was on the planning committee for the Roanoke conference, recalled that most tour-goers never had heard of Jefferson’s Forest, Va., home.

“I remember that the buildings and grounds were modest compared to Monticello, but the tour was informative about Jefferson’s life as a farmer and agricultural innovator,” Coward said.

Though the planners had promised that those on the tour would be back to the hotel by 6 p.m., one of the buses took an unexpected detour.

“The bus limped into a roadside restaurant or bar, and we decamped to some tables outside to tip a glass or two,” Coward said.

Karen Russell and David Davies were newcomers to AJHA that year. Russell remembered piling into the bar with some locals that Friday afternoon, “and the staff wasn't very pleased, especially when we all picked up and left again.”

Davies said the group was at the restaurant/bar for an hour or two while waiting for a ride back to Roanoke.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is my kind of conference,’” Davies said. “The conversations at the bar allowed for even more back-and-forth than usual at an AJHA conference.”

Coward remembered talking at length with Shirley Biagi, Elizabeth Burt, and several other members during the long wait. “We arrived back at the hotel late, but nobody seemed to mind,” Coward said.  

The Thursday evening reception also offered an opportunity for attendees to chat. Riley noted in the Intelligencer that the Roanoke Times & World News, then touted as Virginia’s largest paper west of Richmond, was hosting the reception.

“The newspaper building had a rooftop plaza/garden that offered a view of downtown and the weather was pleasant, so that was an unexpected treat,” Coward said.

Jim McPherson, who also was attending his first AJHA conference that year, remembered spending a lot of time talking to the late Wally Eberhard at that reception. McPherson also recalled that he and another grad student stayed in a cheap motel a ways away from the conference hotel and rented a car.

“It turned out that the conference hotel wasn't close to anything, so I got to drive around some of the long-time members,” he said.

Another first-timer at Roanoke, Janice Hume explained that AJHA wouldn't book a hotel that cost more than $70 a night in those days, “which meant strange places and sometimes sketchy hotels.”

Coward said the hotel was isolated along a major highway, so there were no restaurants, shopping, or attractions to walk to. “That meant that we were all pretty much captives at the hotel, which worked out okay since it was a fairly new property and the food was good,” he said.

One evening, the hotel bar was the site for a spontaneous disco dance. Hume and Russell reminisced about dancing with Davies, Fred Blevens, and Caryl Cooper.

“It was hilarious,” Hume said. “And in case the young people don't know, it was WELL past the disco era.”

Bars and dancing aside, the Roanoke conference featured plenty of serious business. In her president’s column leading up to the conference, Carol Sue Humphrey noted that the membership would be voting on several proposed amendments to the AJHA Constitution and Bylaws. One set called for the creation of the Awards and Convention Sites committees, both of which had been operating as ad-hoc committees for a while.

Another set of amendments created AJHA’s vice-president positions: one to oversee the committees and a second to put together the annual conference program. “Having spent the last 10 months trying to juggle all the current responsibilities of AJHA president, I find this proposal an inviting one that I believe is truly needed,” Humphrey wrote.

In her column, Humphrey praised the efforts of Riley, Coward, the late David Spencer, and Alf Pratte to plan the Roanoke conference. “All of their hard work is clearly paying off in a meeting that promises to be full of good scholarship,” she wrote.

Among the ten panels discussions on the program was one that Riley organized on the Research Society for American Periodicals, featuring that organization’s president and the editor of its academic journal. The program also included 42 research papers and 24 research-in-progress presentations.

Russell presented her paper about public relations, the community, and newspaper coverage of a 1946 steel strike on a paper session about news as propaganda, alongside Burt and Kitty Endres. Davies’s paper was on Presidents Madison and Monroe in the party press, Hume’s was on the women of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and McPherson’s was on newspapers’ use of editorials to define their First Amendment functions.

Karla Gower presented her first AJHA paper in Roanoke as well: “Women in the News: A Look at the Presentation of American Women in News Magazines from 1945-1963.” Gower said her MA advisor was busy with board business, so Spencer took her under his wing and introduced her to people.

Among the people she met was Jim Startt, whom she sat next to at a lunch. Gower experienced what many students attending their first AJHA have felt: the wonder of talking with the very scholars whose work they have read in class.

“I kept thinking, ‘How do I know his name?’ Once I realized (David) Sloan and Startt were the authors of our text, I was awestruck,” Gower said.

All of the first-timers said that they felt right at home among the people in AJHA, and that was why they kept coming back year after year.

Were you at the Roanoke convention? Comment your memories below.

Rich Shumate is an assistant professor in the journalism sequence at Western Kentucky University’s School of Media. Winner of the 2019 Margaret Blanchard Dissertation Prize and 2021 Rising Scholar Award, Shumate is AJHA's web editor and co-coordinator of the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference as well as a member of the Board of Directors and Blanchard Prize Committee.

When and how did you become involved in AJHA?

I first heard about AJHA from Sonny Rhodes, when I was his research assistant in my master’s program at Arkansas-Little Rock. After I moved to Florida to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Florida, I attended my first convention in St. Petersburg, where I had a bit of an epiphany that “these are my people.” I actually drove home from that convention through the tail end of a hurricane.

You've recently received the Rising Scholar Award for your research on "Style, Spin, and Strategy: The Kennedy Press Conferences." What led you to that topic?

I ran across a website that had been put together by a Kennedy buff that had audio and transcripts of all of the news conferences, so I investigated because I knew the research material would be accessible. The Kennedy news conferences are discussed in every biography of Kennedy and every book about the administration as a seminal development in political communication that changed the way presidents communicate. Yet, once I looked into this, I discovered that no one had published an in-depth scholarly study of them. So I thought this was a great opportunity to extend scholarly knowledge. Another interesting facet of this is that even though these news conferences were considered to be a ground-breaking innovation, no president since Kennedy has done this, which is also something I would like to explore. 

How does this research tie into your overall research agenda, including your recent book (stemming from your AJHA award-winning dissertation)?

My research focuses on the news media’s coverage of American politics and how that coverage impacts audiences and political discourse. My book, Barry Goldwater, Distrust in Media, and Conservative Identity: The Perception of Liberal Bias in the News, explores why conservatives came to believe that the news media have a liberal bias, focusing on the early 1960s when conservatives coalesced as a social movement during the Barry Goldwater campaign. I posit a social identity explanation for the phenomenon – that conservatives embrace the belief that the news media have a liberal bias to reinforce their social identity as conservatives. The book was based on my doctoral dissertation that won the Blanchard award in 2019. Given all the research I’ve done about political coverage in the early 1960s, I thought the Kennedy book would be a great fit.

How does your news and editorial background--including your Chicken Fried Politics site--inform your historical research?

One of the reasons that I got interested in liberal bias as a topic is that I know, as a journalist, that the news media do not set out to produce biased content, which raises the question of why conservatives feel that way, which is what I set out to explain in my book. My years covering politics certainly give me a great background to analyze political coverage. My website ChickenFriedPolitics.com covers Southern politics, and Southern conservatives played a significant role in the development of conservatism nationally. So it all goes together.

How does your historical research inform your teaching?

In addition to direct application in teaching media history courses, it also informs media studies/media literacy classes that I teach. The perception of bias and the conservative “fake news” paradigm are topics I cover in those classes, and my research allows me to put a unique perspective on my teaching.

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

I am an obsessive college football fan, particularly my beloved Arkansas Razorbacks. When football season is over, I take long drives in the country to fill the void. I also enjoy opera. (That’s kind of a weird combination, right?)

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

I’m Thomas Schmidt, an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to my academic career, I worked as a journalist for a variety of news organizations in Austria, where I’m from originally. AJHA is very dear to my heart, because its annual conference in Oklahoma City in 2015 was one of my first academic conferences. In addition, I felt particularly honored and humbled to receive honorary mentions for a best student paper at the conference in Little Rock 2017 and for the Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2018, respectively.

What drew you to your topic/time period? 

When I was in my twenties, I discovered American narrative journalism as I was spending a year in New York City thanks to a Fulbright fellowship. There, I for the first time read writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese. Later, I studied the practice of narrative nonfiction at the University of Oregon, and I became increasingly curious about the larger context of this journalistic tradition and why it felt so different from the journalism that I grew up with in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So, when I began my Ph.D. studies, I just wanted to explore this question from a historical and conceptual perspective.

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? 

Thanks to the wonderful guidance from my mentors Lauren Kessler and Gretchen Soderlund, I had a pretty good idea where to begin (the Washington Post in the late 1960s) and where to end (at the Oregonian in the early 2000s). The tricky part was trying to find reliable archival materials because, for example, unlike the New York Times, the Washington Post didn’t have a repository for its organizational documents. I was lucky enough to get access to a special collection at the Poynter Institute (thanks to the amazing support of Roy Peter Clark), which allowed me to tell the story of the Washington Post Style section in great detail. As I was revising my dissertation to be published as a book, I spent some time at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin and felt incredible elation when I found documentation about the first Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, a discovery that greatly enriched my book. It was one of those moments when you sit in a very quiet special collections room and you just want to scream because you’ve found such a gem!

What surprised you most about this project? 

From a historical perspective, I was most surprised by finding out that the evolution of narrative journalism was not just a result of a few writers in New York who just happened to be cultural trendsetters. What really propelled and sustained the emergence of narrative journalism was the interplay of individual actions in newsrooms and institutional initiatives such as writing awards, writer’s workshops, and personal networks. From a personal perspective, I was amazed to find so many primary sources stemming from personal correspondence and organizational communication. The range and quality of these materials would be impossible to find in Europe because journalists and their organizations are not that interested in keeping these kinds of records.

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

I was in the comfortable position to graduate from my Ph.D. program with a book contract from the University of Missouri Press in hand. But my first son was just a few months old at that point and because my wife was working full time in a demanding job, I was juggling being a stay-at-home dad with finishing the book while doing some part-time postdoctoral work. That said, I think these external pressures also helped me to stay focused on substantially expanding and revising my dissertation. Chris Wilson from Boston College helped me figure out some of the more intricate writing challenges and the library at Central Oregon Community College became my second home as I spent wintry nights there writing from 8 p.m. to midnight.

What are you working on now? 

My current research explores the changing role of journalistic objectivity and how it shapes the norms, values, and practices of journalists. Since I’m at UC San Diego, I’m particularly inspired to carry forward a tradition of scholars like Michael Schudson and Dan Hallin. I’m particularly interested in exploring the intersection of journalism and social justice as the Black Lives Matter movement inspired journalists of color to reflect on the systemic blind spots of practices of “objective” reporting when it comes to covering racial and ethnic issues.

Aimee Edmondson took the gavel and became president of AJHA at the 2021 National Conference. In this column, she outlines her goals for her term.

Goal 1: Hook ‘em young.

Those of you lucky enough to have been introduced to the AJHA as graduate students, think back to the first conference that got you hooked.

For me, the dealmaker was the 2006 conference in Wichita, Kansas, and the “party bus,” a tricked out, rolling romper room of a vehicle that hauled our group of distinguished scholars to the Saturday evening gala dinner at a nearby museum.

During the height of football season, all of the regular buses apparently had been scooped up for the “away” high school teams in that part of the state, and the AJHA conference organizers had been relegated to renting what was left over. The party bus.

This thing had a seriously loud stereo system, a disco ball hanging from the ceiling and flashing neon lights bouncing off the walls. The seats had been pulled out and bench seating installed around the sides so there was plenty of room for dancing in the middle. And on our way back from the dinner, there he was: distinguished journalism historian Dr. Dave Davies, then associate dean of the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, doing what only could be described as….the funky chicken.

Who were these people? Had I been transported to some retro rave rather than an academic conference?

My contemporary, fellow graduate student Amber Roessner, also remembers “one strange night of karaoke,” in Wichita. Her adviser, Dr. Janice Hume of the University of Georgia, told her at the time: “What happens at AJHA, stays at AJHA.”

Make no mistake, I had heard Dr. Davies discuss major trends of America’s daily newspapers (1945-1965) earlier at the conference, and I’d already read his edited volume, “The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement.”

Roessner, now an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote in the Intelligencer in 2011: “As a graduate student, after my initial shock of seeing singing and dancing historians, I had numerous opportunities to discuss journalism history with the best and brightest in our field.”

So, if you are like me, the annual AJHA event was the academic conference you didn’t want to miss. These days, it feels a bit challenging to keep that AJHA work-hard, play-hard spirit alive during a pandemic. Slashed university travel budgets and COVID-19 have kept us isolated – away from each other and the archives. 

We’ve had two fantastic virtual meetings, and these annual conferences have enabled us to think big in terms of speakers and sessions. We have seen some advantages of zero travel worries and therefore less of a time and financial commitment. But nothing can replace the AJHA’s in-person research sessions, robust panels, chance meet-ups with old friends and new over breakfast, often where research collaborations begin and take shape. There’s the Donna Allen luncheon, chats over coffee, and always, the Friday afternoon historic tour. The annual conference leaves me invigorated and even more enthusiastic about journalism history and this organization.

As we begin to ramp back up for in-person conferencing, among my goals as this year’s AJHA president is to refocus on expanding our membership numbers and especially to the recruitment of graduate students. The connections we make most often start at the in-person convention and keep us working together throughout the year.

Since our annual October meeting, AJHA members have remained hard at work in their service to the organization. I’ve appointed an ad-hoc committee to look for ways to encourage graduate student attendance and retention at the conference. Special thanks goes out to First VP Mike Conway and Research Chair Gerry Lanosga, both from Indiana, along with board member Michael Fuhlhage from Wayne State, and Claire Rounkles, Graduate Student Committee chair and a Missouri doctoral student. Thank you all for the generous gift of your time and talents.

I don’t want to give too much away yet, but this group will bring to the Board of Directors tangible ways to help expand conference attendance and graduate student funding. Stay tuned to the Intelligencer as more details emerge. Meanwhile, if you’d like to help get involved in this effort or have ideas for this committee, please reach out to me or Mike Conway.

Goal 2: Continue AJHA media literacy efforts

Given the urgent need for an informed populous in a functioning democracy, media literacy topped the list of AJHA officers’ goals in 2020-2021 under the leadership of Donna Lampkin Stephens of Central Arkansas. To maintain these efforts, I have continued to ask our members to help come up with ways we might combat the flood of misinformation and revisionist history narratives that remain all too common in our media ecosystem. And now we’re ready to take things a step further.

I have asked AJHA board member Jennifer Moore of the University of Minnesota Duluth to take the lead in reaching out to other organizations who are working in the area of media literacy. She is researching and gathering resources, making connections and pondering how we as journalism historians can contribute to the conversation on this vital topic. She will then work to put knowledge into action, leading discussions with AJHA members and creating an action plan on how we might help lead the broader conversations within our own communities and nationwide. We can call Jennifer the point person or our media literacy czar, but regardless of her title, I’m grateful that she has stepped into the significant service role that I expect will yield tangible results for our membership and our communities.

We took the lead in highlighting/emphasizing the importance of history in the journalism curriculum. Now is the time to make the same commitment as it relates to media literacy. We’ll talk about this issue at our conference in Memphis, Sept. 27-Oct. 1, 2022. Meanwhile, if you’d like to help Jennifer or get involved in this effort, please reach out to me or her.

Goal 3: Facilitate your work where I can – and sometimes just stay out of your way!

I continue to be amazed by the energy and hard work of our members. Take the efforts of Teri Finneman of Kansas, Pamela Walck of Duquesne and Ashley Walter, a doctoral student at Penn State. These scholars have kept up their momentum from the fantastic oral history preconference event held Oct. 7. These three, along with Candi Carter Olson of Utah State, Melissa Greene-Blye of Kansas, and Will Mari of LSU, provided attendees with two hours chock full of information to advance the field of oral history. A highlighted speaker of the special event was Bonnie Brennan of Marquette, a widely noted expert in qualitative research and oral history.

The preconference oral history organizers have maintained the enthusiasm of that day, and now we are expanding the Oral History Committee by breaking its work into two parts.

Gheni Platenburg from Auburn will continue to oversee the AJHA Oral History Project and work to preserve and publicize the materials gained through the interviews in this project. Please reach out to her or me if you’d like to be part of this exciting effort. Thank you, Gheni, for your leadership in this area.

According to the AJHA Constitution and Bylaws, the second half of the Oral History Committee’s charge is this: “work to encourage the use of oral history in research by journalism historians by developing panels and convention presentations.”

As you can see, the charge of this committee big, so Teri, Pam and Ashley will proceed with some events you won’t want to miss, and that will incorporate some of Pam’s work as editor of American Journalism. They have some exciting things cooking in 2022, so stay tuned to the Intelligencer for details. Thanks again, you three, for all you do.

I see my job as helping to facilitate your work where I can – and where appropriate, just stay out of your way to let you do your jobs. So, I’m finally wrapping up my president’s column about my goals for the year, per the request of our newly-named executive director, Erika Pribanic-Smith of UT-Arlington. You’ve heard my “origin story,” and I’d sometime I’d like to hear yours. (This is what long-time AJHA member Gwyn Mellinger calls your first brush with the AJHA.) And I look forward to making more fun memories at future AJHA conferences in Memphis, then Columbus, Ohio, in 2023, and beyond.

We’ll share what we know about all things historical far and wide. But when it comes to party buses and karaoke, Janice is right: What happens at AJHA stays at AJHA.

Wayne State doctoral candidates Darryl Frazier, left, and Keena Neal present the Research Gang’s paper “Spinning toward Secession: The Interplay of Editorial Bellicosity and Exchange News in the Press before the American Civil War,” at the 2018 AJHA annual conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. The manuscript is now in press in the Southeastern Review of Journalism History.

Michael Fuhlhage is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University.

When and how did you become involved in AJHA?

I took Earnest Perry’s grad seminar in media history during my master’s program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He encouraged me to submit my paper, and it got accepted for the AJHA 2005 conference in San Antonio. I’ve been to all but one AJHA conference since then, and my involvement deepened with panel, paper, and research in progress submissions during my PhD studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Frank Fee, my advisor, and Barbara Friedman, who was on my dissertation committee, really encouraged me to get involved. Since then, I’ve been a frequent paper and panels presenter, panels coordinator, research committee chair, and a member of the AJHA Board of Directors.

Your paper on the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River Borderlands Newspapers recently won AJHA's awards for outstanding paper on a minority history topic. What led you to that particular subject?

Part of it came from being an opportunistic archive pack rat, and part of it was interest in the events that led up to the American Civil War. Some of the journalists I researched for my first book, Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets, were involved in abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. That led more famously through Philadelphia and New York, but it’s a real point of pride for Detroiters that the UGRR’s western network running through Detroit was nearly as busy. I noticed that Michigan journalists’ part in that story had been neglected, with the exceptions of recent works by Afua Cooper and others, and I’ve become more and more interested in local and regional history here in Michigan.

You've been successful forming a research gang with several students. Talk a bit about your process when you're working with a team of students?

It started when I was a panelist for a grad student brown bag session in my department on research agendas and how to get them off the ground. A couple of colleagues in the Wayne State Department of Communication and I did a sort of show and tell about what we were working on and how we got interested in it. And I was brimming with excitement and ideas about news and editorials about the secession movement in 1860-61 after doing research at the American Antiquarian Society in summer 2015. I mentioned I’d like to collaborate with grad students on the primary sources I had brought back. That led to a couple of students following me up to my office to look at a database I’d started that tracks the flow of secession news and opinion from one newspaper and region to another, and they followed me down the rabbit hole. That turned into an AEJMC History Division paper and then an article in American Journalism. That’s how the Research Gang started.

Here’s how the Fugitive Slave Act paper came together: The first thing to remember is most of this in the pandemic lockdown. Campus was closed. Vaccines weren’t even available yet. It would have been easy to give up and sit it out until we could get together in person. But I knew that we had already gathered the primary sources that we needed to explore Detroit journalism’s role in that story. One of the first things I had done after arriving at Wayne State University in 2014 was to spend a few hours combing the card catalog at the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection and learning about their Michigan newspaper holdings. A couple of titles stuck out to me: complete runs of the 1851-52 editions of Henry Bibb’s Voice of the Fugitive and the anti-slavery Baptists’ Michigan Christian Herald in nearly perfect condition in bound volumes. I knew the Detroit Free Press was a pro-slavery voice among the city’s newspapers and thought it would be interesting to compare how the three framed the slavery issue in the same time period. It can be hard to find full runs of a single newspaper, so we were really fortunate to find three in the same time period for direct comparison of their framing of slavery. So in the fall of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Wayne State doctoral candidate Darryl Frazier and M.A. student Eloise Germic and I set out to make digital images of each page of the Voice of the Fugitive and Michigan Christian Herald, and we put them in a shared Google Drive file. Digitizing those papers was initially an exercise in archival methods. We didn’t know exactly what might be done with them at the time. Eloise graduated and moved on to doctoral study elsewhere, and other matters like my going up for tenure, Keena preparing for comps, and oh that’s right, the pandemic hit. Darryl and I pretty much forgot about the digitized newspapers until we all got past those other events and figured out how to teach remotely.

My model for collaboration with graduate students was my professor at UNC, Donald L. Shaw, who would lead free-flowing discussions first about possible general topics, research questions we might ask, how we might locate primary sources to answer those questions, and how to organize our findings. He put a lot of care into creating an agenda for each research team meeting, explaining steps in the research process, working with us to set deadlines, and analyzing the evidence. So I followed that model. The core of the Media History Research Gang at Wayne State consists of myself and students who took my graduate seminar in agenda setting, my doctoral advisees, and M.A. and undergrad honors students in my American journalism and media history course.

I got the ball rolling by convening an organizational meeting to decide which of a list of ongoing research projects they’re most interested in. The Research Gang had tackled the flow of news about secession in 1860, newspaper news and opinion during the secession crisis, and the work of a Wayne State journalism alumnus who had covered the Civil Rights Movement in the South in the 1960s. Variations on those topics were on the list, but we also had these really rich primary sources that we hadn’t done anything with yet that concerned the struggle over slavery in the Detroit River borderlands connecting Michigan and Ontario. I think we were all really curious about what we would find once we started to explore them, so that became the topic. Then it became a matter of dividing the work according to our interests and skills. We used Zoom, email, and Google Drive to coordinate on the project.

Keena, who is my doctoral advisee, Darryl, and I had already collaborated on a couple of projects, and as new members of the Research Gang each of them had started with compiling, analyzing primary evidence, and discussing how their findings fit with everyone else’s. Darryl had photographed the Voice of the Fugitive, so he already had a stake in that title. Keena was intrigued in the idea of interracial cooperation and allyship in the fight against slavery. The Michigan Christian Herald fit that theme, so that became her object of analysis. Anna Lindner, another of my doctoral advisees and the junior partner on the team for this paper, took on analyzing the Detroit Free Press, which we accessed through a database. She also wrote our methods section in consultation with me based on team discussions of how we would execute the study.

As the established historian, I had the most solid grounding in the literature, so I wrote the background section. Keena, Darryl, and Anna started reading and taking notes on their newspapers while I completed the background section—and that really was crucial for everyone to understand enough about the political, economic, and cultural context in order to do their analysis of their respective newspapers. We touched base about whether the research questions guiding us were really doing the job and adjusted after everyone had swum in the evidence a bit. Once everyone was finished with analysis, we reconvened as a group to make sense of what had been discovered and to assign writing and editing duties. Keena took on writing the introduction and Anna wrote the conclusion. My role at this stage was to merge all the parts together, line edit it so it read as one piece, and make sure we hit deadline. We all proofread. For the conference presentation, I feel that it’s my students who need the most exposure as people bound for the job market soon, so as long as they don’t have something heavy at conference time like defending comps or a dissertation prospectus I offer that role to the students. My role then is to prepare rough slides that they’re free to tweak and otherwise be their cheerleader.

What do you believe is the value of co-authoring with students?

There are so many valuable things that come out of it. Of course, my students learn how to execute a historical research project step by step. But I always learn something new from them because they have the benefit of having recently studied with my faculty colleagues from disciplines different from my own. Because of this, the students often bring different ways of seeing to a project. Here’s a confession: I recognize that I’ve sometimes been guilty of methodological sloppiness. Working with my students keeps me on my toes in terms of rigor in our methods of analysis. I benefit from their knowledge and expertise as they benefit from mine. In addition, it’s really satisfying to see how the students are growing as each phase of a project comes together. And it fills me with pride when I see them present the work that we completed together.

How do you incorporate research into your teaching?

For one thing, teaching historical methods from scratch to the Research Gang students has made me pay close attention to how to explain the steps that I outlined above in a step-by-step fashion. This semester, I’m experimenting with a hybrid group/individual final project for my undergraduate journalism history students. I created a list of 13 topics through various periods in U.S. and Detroit history. Then I surveyed my students and assigned them to nine teams. This way, they have a degree of ownership in the project in that they were able to pick something they were already relatively fascinated with. I’m getting them off the ground by guiding them as they formulate initial research questions, master some of the secondary literature for their topic and period, refine keywords to use in a newspaper database, and analyze and organize their findings. This pretty much follows the Research Gang model, but it feels a little like building an airplane while it’s taking off. It’s a fun challenge, and I’m learning a lot in the process by examining secondary lit about topics and historical periods that haven’t necessarily been at the center of my own bull’s-eye of research interests.

What are you working on next?

I’ve got a few projects at various stages of completion. I’ll just describe one of them here: It’s an extension, reorganization, and rewrite of my dissertation on the prehistory of stereotypes about Mexicans in the American nineteenth-century press.

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

Gardening is one. During the pandemic lockdown I needed to do something that made me feel like I was in control of something since so much was beyond our control. So I took an online extension course in vegetable and fruit gardening. I’ve dabbled in music for years and have a piano and a couple of electric and a couple of acoustic guitars. I love the arts of all kinds and visit art museums when I need to refill my cup of joy and inspiration. But my newest toy is a Fender Mustang P/J short-scale electric bass guitar. For ages, I have loved the play of Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth and the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman, who both played Mustangs. My big bass heroes are Geddy Lee and John Entwistle, but Rickenbacker and Alembic are a little rich for my taste, at least for a beginner’s bass.