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

By Dr. Kaylene Armstrong

When I first started reading one student’s media history research paper, I was surprised. Her writing had improved remarkably from all the previous work she had turned in. Naturally, my plagiarism antenna went up, and within a few keystrokes I found her paper word-for-word — on Wikipedia, no less. I expected the usual litany of excuses for plagiarizing — no time, started too late, illness/personal problems/work interfered with getting it done, etc. Instead, the response she gave was one I hadn’t really expected: “I’ve never written a research paper in my life, and you didn’t teach us how to do it.”

She was right. That’s the sort of thing my own children learned in their high school senior English class, not in a college class, right?

This piece is meant to spark discussion among colleagues so that more voices can add perspective and ideas for successfully tackling the student research paper.

Through the last few years of teaching a media history class, I have encountered several challenges with students when it comes to research papers: the assignment itself, the writing, the sources and the citations.

Making the research paper assignment interesting and at least a little challenging has always been my plan. I have each student write a history of his or her hometown newspaper. It wouldn’t be thorough by any means because it only had to be 1,000 words, but I hoped it would inspire them to work on finding some interesting things about what should be an institution in their hometowns.

The perimeters for the assignment include using at least four sources, one of which has to be an interview with a live person at the newspaper, preferably the publisher or editor, about its continuing role in the community. I suggest they ask the existing editor if an old, retired staffer was still around who also might have historical knowledge to share about the newspaper, knowledge such as when the old linotype machines were replaced with “cold type” or what quirks the old presses had or stories they have to tell about experiences in the newsroom.

The students are specifically warned NOT to use Wikipedia or any other unreliable sources. I suggest the students check for books or journal articles instead. In many areas of the country, enterprising researchers (perhaps as a dissertation) have written books or lengthy journal pieces about the history of a particular newspaper. As most of my students are from Oklahoma, I suggest they use a book found in our library: “The story of Oklahoma newspapers, 1844 to 1984” by L. Edward Carter.

The newspaper itself can serve as a source, especially articles from the earliest editions that might include information from early editors and reporters who address the purpose or goals of the newspaper. I encourage them to find the first edition (many are available online) and then determine who were the various editors.

When I first designed the project, I got excited just thinking of it. I tried to convey that excitement when we talked about it the first day of class. I expressed my hope that some of the small newspapers they wrote about would be interested in running an edited version of the student’s paper (with the citations modified), and I offered extra credit if they did.

I wish I could report that I got wonderful papers, with stellar writing and excellent researching, but alas I did not. No one earned an A. Most of them found the exercise daunting and not as exciting as I had hoped. Actually interviewing another person intimidated almost everyone in the class, even when I provided lengthy lists of possible questions to ask. Only a few included the newspaper itself as a source, but did a poor job of incorporating it smoothly into the paper. In fact, the biggest challenge for students seemed to be figuring out how to transition between the various pieces of information they found. Almost all had major writing problems: sentences that didn’t make sense (fragments and incorrect word usage), and grammar/spelling/punctuation errors. Few had taken the time to copyedit their work.

Now I spend at least a couple of days, sometimes three, on how to research and write a research paper. I hand out and review an example research paper that I created. I emphasize copy editing, reading work aloud, getting someone else to read the work. I remind them that I grade harshly for carelessness. I require all sources to be approved beforehand—so many want easy Britannica-like sources online rather than using the databases that the library provides to find academic sources and books. I require all papers to be submitted electronically so they can be run through Turnitin to find plagiarism issues. As usual, I encourage (beg?) all students to come see me for help.

A friend suggested I drop the research paper and save myself the headaches. I won’t do that. I will continue to try to teach these students how to do good research, and maybe I can spark the same love of media history that I have.

Dr. Kaylene Armstrong is an associate professor of mass communication, Northwestern Oklahoma State University. 

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I was encouraged by several of my graduate student colleagues to submit a paper for presentation at the AJHA convention. It was accepted and during that weekend I met some fabulous people who encouraged me, challenge me and in many ways helped shape my future. I would not be who I am today as a scholar, teacher, person without AJHA.

Why are inclusion, diversity, and equity important in education?

If journalists are going to tell other people’s stories, then they need as students to begin to understand that you are engaging with people who come from different cultures and backgrounds and that those backgrounds are connected in economic ways, in racialized ways, in different cultures. One of the most important ways to be able to have a better understanding is to be a part of educational environments that are diverse. I think that’s important. I think it’s always been important.

How can programs better include these ideas?

I think the most important thing is to introduce students to the ideas of inclusion, diversity and equity early as freshman. They’re in educational environments. We need to do a better job of educating them to better understand other spaces and cultures and embrace the fact that this is a never-ending educational process. And that process should start day one when you walk in.

What drew you to early 20^th century Black press history?

I’ve always liked history, even when I was an undergrad, in particular, civil rights history. What draws me to the early twentieth century is looking at where the press and in particular the Black press, was and the role that it played in helping African Americans navigate Jim Crow. How do you navigate this space that you are in? How do you navigate being asked to be an American when you are denied the rights of Americans? They could pick up a white newspaper but the only times they’d see themselves in it was if something bad happened. The only place they could see themselves in education or church or all of these spaces that they lived their lives was in the Black press.

What hobbies or interests do you have outside of academia?

When I’m not working I like to play golf, cook (mainly BBQ) and watch sports (St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Chiefs). I don’t get to do enough of those things. Life as an administrator is pretty tough these days, but the joy comes from watching my students achieve their goals. That makes all the hard work worthwhile.

Earnest Perry is is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Missouri School of Journalism. Dr. Perry currently serves as chair of the Publications Committee for the Association on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He is a former president of American Journalism Historians Association, a former chair of the Standing Committee on Research and a member of the Standing Committee on Teaching  for AEJMC.

By Aimee Edmondson

During our last week of spring classes in late April, I took a grading break and scrolled across an Instagram post from my friend and colleague Julie Elman, who teaches design and the creative process at Ohio University.

In her trademark zany style, Julie drew a pointed purple face with plants growing out of her open brain and included the hashtag #100DaysOfWhatever. The image reeks of exhaustion, but there’s determination on that pinched, weary face. Summer break was upon us, and Julie reminded me that it’s the perfect time to nurture those sprouts, those little green tendrils of creativity.

Julie knows of what she draws. A professor in Ohio’s School of Visual Communication, she brings 15 years of newspaper design experience to the classroom. She designed the book “The Rise of Barack Obama” for another colleague, Pete Souza, who left Ohio University to become the chief White House Photographer during the Obama years. Her book of freehand drawings, “Fear Illustrated: Transforming What Scares Us,” was published in 2017 and will change the way you think about your own biggest anxieties. 

So, taking a cue from Julie, I set out this summer to make the most of my #100daysofwhatever. To me, this was to be THE summer for regrowth, mindfulness, and nurturing creative processes. What was I going to do with this time?

Certainly, there’s the research agenda and a few open-at-last archives to visit, but work could be done at a less frenetic pace than the pre-tenure and pre-promotion years. The pandemic consumed and transformed everyone’s school year, and I had not even taken the time to think ahead to the summer break.

Then my mom died unexpectedly in May, and I have a dear friend who is battling the end stages of cancer. These #100daysofwhatever began to matter even more as I think about how we spend the time that we have.

So, for the rest of this summer: more time paddling on the lake, more time in the garden, more reading just for fun in the hammock, more in-person visits with friends and family after 15 months of isolation (everyone fully vaccinated, of course).

And yes, more time to think about the AJHA and how our organization can continue to contribute to the national conversation about journalism and journalism history during this pivotal time in our profession. As you may have read, the AJHA officers are working to provide our membership with more information about media literacy—this is one of our main goals of the year.

As journalists and media historians, we must continue our work addressing the onslaught of misinformation and revisionist history narratives that have become all too common in today’s information ecosystem. If you haven’t done so yet, please take a look at some of the resources on the AJHA web page and stay tuned to the Intelligencer as we continue to solicit more content from the nation’s top experts and educators in the area of media literacy. AJHA president Donna Lampkin Stephens, second VP Mike Conway and I want to hear from you about this topic. Please share your ideas and any resources you have relating to media literacy, and we’ll make them available to the AJHA membership.

I continue to draw inspiration from the creativity of our AJHA members, and I love keeping up with you via the Intelligencer, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

And, of course, summer is still a time for assessment reports, accreditation self-study, directing graduate students’ theses and dissertations. But there’s still time for regrowth, reflection on what really matters in our lives and nurturing our own creative processes.

What are you doing with your #100DaysOfWhatever?

Aimee Edmondson is a professor and Director for Graduate Studies at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. She serves as First Vice President of AJHA. 

Why did you choose to write a biography of New York Congressman Emanuel Celler?

When I wrote the 2012 biography, City Son, Andrew W. Cooper’s Impact on Modern-Day Brooklyn, Celler was among five members of Congress representing gerrymandered Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville, which was 80% Black and Puerto Rican.

After my Cooper biography was published, I discovered that Celler was known for 1965 immigration reform. I was intrigued because my parents and extended family, Caribbean natives, have immigration stories. From internet searches I found that a few sites demonized Celler, Jacob Javits and Chuck Schumer as people who allegedly destroyed American culture because of their immigration reform advocacy.

University Press of Mississippi, my publisher, green-lighted the Celler book idea. Early in the research I learned my subject was richer. Celler was also the godfather of civil rights legislation, because as longtime chairman of the House Judiciary Committee he was floor manager of landmark legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Celler served nearly 50 years in Congress. What were his accomplishments?

Celler co-authored three Constitutional amendments, Voting Rights for citizens who live in the District of Columbia [23^rd], Abolishing Poll Taxes [24^th] and Presidential Succession [25^th]. Celler did not personally support it, yet he successfully floor managed a fourth amendment, the 26^th, Voting Rights for 18-year-olds.

Celler’s name is on at least 300 U.S. laws. Among them is the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, which historians are now crediting Celler with rescuing approximately 340,000 to 600,000 refugees, many of them Jewish, trapped in post-World War II Germany and Poland.

Celler was an unequivocal advocate for an independent Jewish state, achieved in 1948 with the creation of Israel from former British colony Palestine.

Also, Celler pressed the FDR administration during World War II to establish U.S. diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The United States made good on that promise in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was president, also the year Celler died.

What might surprise readers regarding Celler’s political or personal life?

Celler has been hiding in plain view. There are 600,000 documents about the man at the Library of Congress. My research however began at Brooklyn Public Library central office, which had a Celler College in its Brooklyn Room.

Celler’s family heritage was Jewish and Catholic from Germany. Celler wrote two books, “The Draft and You,” a 1940 primer, and “You Never Leave Brooklyn,” his 1953 autobiography.

Celler’s creative talents were piano, his preferred instrument, violin, which his parents made him play. He doodled and drew caricatures of his political colleagues, and made paper puppets to entertain his grandchildren. Celler kept a diary book of pithy sayings to cite when he spoke publicly.

A secretary who worked for Celler during 1965-1972, his last years in Congress, told me in June that although I cited a source who wrote that the congressman was 5-feet, 2-inches tall, Celler was probably closer to 5-feet 7-inches tall. A rare, near-fatal illness in 1941 may have curved Celler’s spine.

Celler’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment contributed to his 1972 upset defeat by Elizabeth Holtzman, however Celler’s views on women was much more enlightened than his male congressional colleagues. Celler was praised by a coalition of women’s organizations for ending a ban on wives working for the government if their husbands were federal employees, and he lobbied for the acceptance of women doctors in the Medical Reserve Corps.

Yet Celler, born at the end of the 1800s, was Victorian in attitude toward women.

Bryan Cranston, who played LBJ in the 2014 Broadway play “All the Way,” performed as Celler too and spoke a few lines. However, in the 2016 HBO movie version of “All the Way,” Celler was not cast, but an adversary, Rep. Howard “Judge” Smith of Virginia, was featured.

Wayne Dawkins, 2016 AJHA Educator of the Year, is a professor of professional practice at Morgan State University School of Global Journalism and Communication. 

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

I'm Paige Gray. I'm a liberal arts professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and I've previously taught at Fort Lewis College, the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Much of the historical research that I did for Cub Reporters was rooted in journalism history, so I relied heavily on scholarship from the AJHA and its members.

What drew you to your topic/time period?

I've been fascinated by newspapers and journalism since I was very young. I used to recruit my friends in elementary school to be on my newspaper—but no one ever did their assigned stories! I ended up writing the stories and drawing the accompanying art all by hand on blank sheets of computer paper, designing it to look like a newspaper with columns and headlines.

My undergraduate honors thesis focused on The Wizard of Oz. Instead of going into a PhD program after my BA, I decided to go into journalism. After doing my MA in Chicago, I did newspaper work in Colorado and New Mexico, which I loved. But academia still nagged at me, and I was interested in further exploring children's literature.

When I started my PhD coursework and began thinking about my dissertation, I was trying to answer questions about my own interests—Why am I so fascinated by children's literature? Why am I so fascinated by journalism?

This led me to the Golden Age of children's literature—basically the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth—which is also a golden age for the American newspaper.

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?

Cub Reporters was my dissertation. The project evolved over many years. In the early days, I focused on the overlap between the figure of the child and the figure of the reporter in American culture—how in the public imagination, these were agents of curiosity. They also seemed to have a reciprocal relationship, the reporter in the child, the child in the reporter. This led my initial outline and scholarship to be rooted in the concept of curiosity. As my work began solidifying into distinct chapters, new ideas and possibilities emerged. It wasn't until after I had solid chapter drafts that I made the connection to what I eventually termed "artifice."

What surprised you most about this project?

So many things! The notion of "surprise"—the constant promise of discovery and newness—is why I love both reporting and scholarship. In particular, the ways in which American journalism and children's literature responded and reflected one another further revealed to me the constructed nature of childhood and adulthood as well as how we police ideas of curiosity and creativity.

In terms of the book's material and subjects, stumbling upon the Chicago Defender Junior was probably my biggest (and most delightful) research surprise.

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

My monograph started as my dissertation, so when I began revision work, my professional world had changed—no longer was I graduate student with mentors surrounding me (at least in physical proximity), giving me guidance. Also, I was teaching full-time, so I had to be judicious with time. But more than that, I had to learn to really trust myself and the scholar I'd become. This was crucial since I recrafted the manuscript's organizing thesis.

What are you working on now?
I usually have several projects I'm juggling—articles and chapters in various stages of development. Ideas are never the problem. It's time! I recently finished work on a chapter for a collecting commemorating The Brownies' Book, published by W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP in 1920. That research extends on my chapter in Cub Reporters on the Chicago Defender Junior by looking at other children's sections in Black weeklies around that period.

What topic would you like to tackle next?
I've been working on a new-book project since I moved to Atlanta and discovered the Center for Puppetry Arts. Puppetry may seem like a sharp turn from Cub Reporters, but it's really more of an extension. Cub Reporters considers how American children’s literature of the Golden Age subverts the idea of news; journalism, in the works that the book discusses, is not a reporting of fact, but a reporting of artifice. With this new project (tentatively called Play Things), I'm still thinking about artifice’s primacy to the human experience. While the cub reporters of children’s literature report the truth of artifice and relish it, the avatars of American puppetry similarly suggest the superseding condition of the human experience is that of creative invention—to be human is to create. The artifice of the puppet makes this notion inescapable. Through the creation of life via material means, puppetry promotes artifice, and promotes it through the acknowledgement of its process.

How did you become involved in AJHA? 

My dissertation adviser at UNC Chapel Hill, Barbara Friedman, encouraged me to get involved and submit my paper from her journalism history seminar to the AJHA conference. This was my first paper acceptance as a doctoral student and it was so memorable that I kept the email sent me by then research chair, Janice Hume. Janice has been a wonderful role model and mentor, and is representative of the inspiring, encouraging, and supportive scholars students get a chance to know through AJHA.

How does your previous career working for major market and international news organizations relate to your research approach? 

Working for more than two decades across multiple cities, beats and roles has given me a deep practitioners’ knowledge of journalism from which to draw on. I pioneered the ethnic affairs beat, and covered city politics, gentrification, immigration, business, and courts, among other things. As the only Mexican American woman general assignment reporter, I brought a different lived experience and perspective to covering the news. I was acutely aware of how unrepresentative journalism was (and still is) in relation to our demographics. While serving on the board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), I became involved in the development of UNITY, a collaboration between the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), and the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA). We thought that by joining forces we might better push for change. This fault lines approach to journalism is a lens that I use in my historical research and is key to challenging limited binary approaches to understanding journalism history.

What influence does your family history and background have on your research interests?

I was raised in a bilingual, bicultural household and acutely aware of discrimination my parents, grandparents, and other relatives faced in San Antonio, Texas. For instance, one of my uncles, who had been a POW during World War II, returned home only to be denied service in a Texas restaurant. Mexican school children, when they didn’t attend segregated schools, were forced to sit in the back of the classroom. The front seats were reserved for White students. Growing up, we were exposed to both English and Spanish language media, and early on, I had a clear sense of Spanish-language media and its significance in U.S. journalism.

In your view, what needs to change in the field of journalism history and why?

It’s in some ways unfair to single out journalism history, because lack of representation is a significant concern throughout academia, the media, and our nation. Considering how reporting across the fault lines of race, gender, class, generation, and geography intersect with every beat, from healthcare, to business, to sports, to climate change, etc., it becomes increasingly clear that we need a faculty that looks more like America, and we need research that looks at journalism history through a range of lenses, theories, and methods.

It goes without saying that journalism history is more than knowing landmark events. Journalism history is at least in part about understanding the role of journalism in developing communities of readers and in many cases, inculcating ideas about who merits citizenship. In the context of journalism education, journalism history, if approached as something beyond merely toting up facts, helps ground future journalists in the power of the press, helps them understand that the press, in varied manifestations, is an institution that has helped build and shape communities, and has also been complicit in helping tear some communities apart.

What hobbies or interests do you have outside of academia?

Mark Twain has been (most likely erroneously) quoted as saying that “golf is a good walk spoiled.” I am more inclined to say that a walk is a good golf game spoiled.

Melita M. Garza studies news as an agent of democracy, specializing in English- and Spanish-language news, the immigrant press, and coverage of underrepresented groups. Garza is an associate professor at TCU’s Bob Schieffer College of Communication in Fort Worth. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012 after two decades as a reporter.