2026 AJHA Paper Abstracts

Papers

“Responding to Nativists: Antebellum Irish American Editors as Protectors of the Irish Immigrants and the Catholic Faith”

Mary M. Cronin

Faculty

New Mexico State University

Debra Reddin van Tuyll

Faculty

Augusta University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: Jean Palmegiano Award for outstanding transnational journalism research paper

Abstract: The immigrant press has multiple roles, one of the most important of which is that of community building. This paper examines how the earliest Irish-American press (1810 to 1840) used anti-nativist arguments to defend Irish emigrants and their religion. Their purpose in doing so was to demonstrate why Catholicism was no impediment to Irish-Americans becoming sound American citizens.

“From the Desk of a New Yorker Correspondent and OWI Propagandist: Philip Hamburger's Work in Government Information and Journalism”

Elisabeth Fondren, Ph.D.

Faculty

St. John's University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: Jean Palmegiano Award for outstanding transnational journalism research paper

Abstract: American journalist Philip Hamburger, who would become one of the twentieth century's best political writers, was also one of the country's top propagandists. During World War II, he worked in the Office of War Information (OWI) and authored some of the key propaganda leaflets for the Office of Facts and Figures, as archival records show. As a war correspondent, Hamburger embedded with Allied troops and traveled to Europe, from where he reported from Rome on VE DAY May 8, first-class examples of literary war reporting. Drawing on extensive primary sources from the Hamburger Papers at the NYPL Manuscript Division, OWI propaganda records, editorial files, telegrams, and correspondence from The New Yorker editorial records, and the Henry Pringle papers at the Library of Congress, this paper argues that the literature on press-government relations is incomplete without a deeper appreciation of Hamburger's extensive work in World War II government information and his simultaneous role as a budding war reporter.

“The Press and Watergate: Three Theories of Journalism's Influence”

Jon Marshall, Sarah L. Han

Faculty and Student

Northwestern University (Medill School)

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: David Sloan Award for outstanding faculty research paper

Abstract: Historians have deflated the myth that reporters were primarily responsible for Richard Nixon's downfall. Instead, the actions of the FBI, courts, special prosecutors, the Senate, and the House forced Nixon's resignation. The question remains whether Congress and the legal system would have acted in the same way, or as quickly, without the press. To answer that question, this study applies James Carey's approach of seeking to understand how people in the past grasped reality. To determine what was in the minds of officials who unraveled the Watergate conspiracy, and how much they were influenced by press coverage, the authors visited seven Watergate-related archives, interviewed fifteen people involved in Watergate investigations, read six memoirs by crucial Watergate figures, and examined transcripts of Senate hearings, oral histories, and the Congressional Record. This research suggests three theories of journalism's influence—accelerant, evidentiary, and narrative crafting—best explain how the press affected Watergate's outcome.

“Richmond Free Press As Reflector of the Legacy of Raymond H. Boone, Sr.”

George L. Daniels, Ph.D.

Faculty

University of Alabama

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: J. William Snorgrass Award for outstanding minority-journalism research paper

Abstract: The same year as Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, became a one-newspaper town as the afternoon newspaper, The Richmond News Leader closed, a new Black weekly newspaper came on the scene. Raymond H. Boone, Sr. launched the Richmond Free Press in 1992. It was his second time running a Black-owned publication in Virginia's capital city. A dozen years after Boone's death in 2014, Richmond Free Press shut its doors in February 2026. This study assembles Boone's own words in writings dating back to his years as a high school journalist and oral history interviews to establish the legacy of one who worked six decades as a journalist. Then, the study identifies five pillars of the Raymond Boone legacy and shows how the Richmond Free Press reflected that legacy in its 34 years of existence.

“Power of a Pen Name: Women Journalists and the Benefits of a Pseudonym, 1850-1900”

Autumn Lorimer Linford, Ph.D.

Faculty

Auburn University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: Maurine Beasley Award for outstanding women's history research paper

Abstract: Women wanting careers in American journalism between 1850-1900 faced many challenges in the newsroom and in society. Using a pen name helped some women skirt these issues by emphasizing their femineity, hiding their identities, or hiding their gender, among other benefits. It was an imperfect solution. Pseudonyms allowed women to express their ideas publicly while maintaining gender roles but kept them from fully claiming their work.

“Hispanic Link News Service's Inaugural Year: Filling a Void in the Mainstream Press”

Michael Fuhlhage, Kelly Kozlowski

Faculty and Student

Wayne State University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: J. William Snorgrass Award for outstanding minority-journalism research paper

Abstract: American mainstream media predicted the 1980s would be the "Decade of the Hispanic," but that was hardly the case in the media landscape of the time. Hispanic representation in newsrooms was almost nonexistent; news coverage consistently ignored Hispanic perspectives and issues. This study examines how Hispanic Link News Service established an issue agenda specific to Hispanics as a direct response to a dominant agenda and culture that devalued and neglected the Hispanic American community. Through a content analysis of the 147 columns distributed by Hispanic Link in its first year, 1980, this research identifies an issue agenda focused on Politics, International Affairs, Culture, Immigration, and Education. Where lived experiences, perspectives, and expertise of the Hispanic American community were previously overlooked, Hispanic Link elevated them to national consciousness through first-level and second-level agenda-setting that shaped issue salience and framing for a Latino audience and united the population with a shared agenda.

“From Consciousness Raising or News-making? Second Wave Feminism, Epistemology and Industry Norms”

Bailey Dick

Faculty

Bowling Green State University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: Maurine Beasley Award for outstanding women's history research paper

Abstract: During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the radical and liberal wings of the Women's Liberation Movement developed divergent media strategies. This paper argues that the practice of consciousness raising developed by radical feminists offered an epistemological model rooted in lived experiences capable of subverting the deeply entrenched professional norms and practices of the journalism industry. The liberal wing, leveraging professional media and political backgrounds, developed a media strategy that played to news industry routines, but led to a cultural conception of women and feminism couched in individualism rather than collectivism. Drawing on archival materials from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Sallie Bingham Center at Duke University, and records from the New York Radical Women, New York Radical Feminists, Redstockings, Ms. magazine, and The New Woman's Survival Catalog, this paper asserts that the hegemonic norms of the journalism industry, including objectivity, two-sides storytelling, and writing for an implied white, male audience—led to the dissemination of messaging around feminism that continues to uphold neoliberal values, rather than collective, structural critique.

“Cynicism, Pragmatism, and Crisis Control: French Propaganda and Press Censorship During the February Revolution in Petrograd”

Charles Sorrie, PhD

Faculty

The Kehillah School

Session type: Regular

Abstract: In World War I, the French government implemented a strict press censorship regime. The cabinet and high command dictated what to propagate in newspapers and what was prohibited from publication. The February Revolution in Petrograd is the first major example of how the French wartime information management system successfully manipulated the press into portraying potentially ominous news as a positive story. In March 1917, France was in the throes of malaise and in two and a half years of war, had lost over 900,000 soldiers. The February Revolution confronted French citizens and soldiers with the threat of losing France's most significant ally. In response, the machinations of French press control followed a ‘grand design' to limit panic and sensationalism. This paper demonstrates that French information management proved a highly effective tool of war during a moment of heightened crisis to the French war effort.

“Flaws of war correspondence: Evaluating recurrent shortcomings over time”

W. Joseph Campbell, PhD

Faculty

American University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: Wally Eberhard Award for best historical research paper on media and war

Abstract: This paper identifies and discusses three varieties of reporting flaws that emerged during the Gettysburg endgame in 1863 and likewise were apparent during the Iraq War and its immediate aftermath in 2003. Specifically, the paper considers the hazards of reporting about military engagements from considerable distance, the vulnerabilities of relying on sources whose identities are not shared in correspondents' dispatches, and the phenomenon of motivated perception, or the "blindness to inconvenient facts." The paper ranges widely, tapping a variety of source material in presenting evidence that significant defects of war correspondence are evident and recognizable over time. Identifying and examining recurrent shortcomings in war reporting is undeniably relevant, given that journalism history offers considerable value when study of the past illuminates themes that are relevant and illuminating to contemporary practice.

“When Adjustment Isn't Acquiescence: A Microhistory of Brigitte Reimann and Mass Media Censorship in East Germany, 1950-1974”

Sheila B. Lalwani

Student

University of Texas at Austin

Session type: Regular

Paper Award: Robert Lance Award for outstanding student research paper

Abstract: East Germany oversaw a vast mass communication system that featured an extensive censorship apparatus. This apparatus included editors, publishing houses, and party representatives. This article presents a case study drawing on the German concept of "anpassen" to examine how Brigitte Reimann, a former journalist, but best known as one of East Germany's most significant women literary writers, adjusted to state censorship. Drawing on diaries, letters, and literary works, this article shows that, for Reimann, adjustment was not always acquiescence. It featured complying with state control and privately contesting it. This article challenges macro-level studies of censorship in East Germany by illuminating it as a lived experience from a female perspective. It contributes to media history by offering a microhistory of censorship as a series of personal and impersonal encounters, elucidating that partial compliance and private contempt coexisted within the state mass media system.

“The Chicago Defender's Way to Health: Morality, Race, and Venereal Diseases”

Paul Myers

Student

University of Missouri

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: Robert Lance Award for outstanding student research paper

Abstract: The early twentieth century was a formative period in American medicine and public health, when moral beliefs, racial ideologies, and the emerging sciences all shaped explanations of health disparities. This study explored how Dr. A Wilberforce Williams, a Black physician and the health column editor at The Chicago Defender, educated readers about venereal disease from 1913 through 1935. Williams's identity as a Black physician complicated his approach to medicine, as much of the medical discussion around venereal diseases was steeped in race-based rhetoric. Although Williams would attempt to decouple race from the equation, he simultaneously acquiesced to and promoted moralistic arguments. At the same time, he provided period-correct medical explanations of how to identify venereal diseases and how they affected the body. However, his advice offered limited practical guidance, highlighting the difficulties of navigating rapidly changing health sciences.

“Separation of War and Death: Recontextualizing War Photography through Robert Capa and Lee Miller”

Taylor Sheridan

Student

University of Missouri

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: Wally Eberhard Award for best historical research paper on media and war

Abstract: This paper examines how the separation of combat and atrocity in war photography was historically produced during World War II and continues to shape how wars are photographed and remembered. Through a comparative historical and visual analysis of Robert Capa's and Lee Miller's WWII photographs, the study traces the emergence of two divergent visual paradigms: combat-centered heroism and aftermath-centered witnessing. By recontextualizing Miller's work with Capa's this study interrogates the canon of war photography and the conflicts between competing paradigms of war photography: action versus aftermath.

“"TO UNFORTUNATE FEMALES": The Ever-More-Obvious Language of Abortion Advertisements in the 19th Century”

Julie Hedgepeth Williams, PhD

Faculty

Samford University

Session type: Regular

Abstract: Journalist Cokie Roberts once said on NPR that she had heard there were ads for abortion in 19th century newspapers – but she couldn't find any. NPR was forced to admit that Roberts was wrong. And how! A search of the Chronicling America historic newspapers database showed that many 19^th century ads touted pills and devices to terminate pregnancy. The problem for Roberts was that they never used the word "abortion." Instead, they used coded words which forced women to read between the lines – which wasn't difficult. As the 19^th century developed, the language in abortion ads got ever more blatant. Earlier ads suggested coyly that "female pills" could restart the monthly period; later ads told readers straight up that such pills were safe for female trouble, but pregnant users should not use them, as they were sure to cause a miscarriage – which was apparently the true point of the medication.

“Frenemies with a ‘Newshen': The Interrogatory Relationship Between JFK and Sarah McClendon that Defied Gender Limits”

Dr. Rich Shumate

Faculty

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Session type: Regular

Abstract: During the Kennedy presidency, independent White House correspondent Sarah McClendon faced sharp criticism from her male colleagues, and President John F. Kennedy's press secretary, for her iconoclastic style of questioning during his press conferences, which were broadcast on television for the first time. Yet Kennedy continued to call on McClendon regularly, saying he was "curious" about what she would ask and did not fear her questions. Through an examination of video of Kennedy's 64 press conferences held between January 1961 and November 1963, this paper explores the curious relationship between McClendon and Kennedy, which allowed her to assert herself and overcome barriers she faced as a women reporter in a male-dominated environment. This study also explores the origins and consequences of the gender-centric criticism aimed at McClendon over her press conference performances.

“Reading Lemon Grove Through the Press: Themes in English- and Spanish-Language Press Coverage of School Segregation in 1931”

Jose Duran

Student

University of Memphis

Session type: Regular

Abstract: This paper examines English- and Spanish-language newspaper coverage of the 1931 Lemon Grove school segregation controversy in Southern California. Drawing on seventeen newspaper items published between January and May 1931 in La Opinión, the San Diego Union, and The San Diego Sun, the study uses thematic analysis to compare how different publications represented the conflict. The findings show that English-language coverage emphasized administrative authority, Americanization, school disruption, and legal procedure, while La Opinión emphasized exclusion, community mobilization, Mexican belonging, and collective defense. These differences shaped the public meaning of the controversy and contributed to the creation of different archival records. The paper argues that examining the press coverage of Lemon Grove helps explain both the case's historical obscurity and the partial ways in which it has later been recovered within desegregation historiography.

“Outrageous Acts: Late 19th Century Press Politics & Black”

Susan Bragg, Ph.D.

Faculty

Georgia Southwestern State University

Session type: Regular

Abstract: The lives of African American girls rarely break the surface in our histories of the New South, particularly in regions like Southwest Georgia where the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow has created a complicated racial terrain. This project explores how local reporting about black girlhood in the mainstream white press reveals the daily politics of both constructing and challenging Jim Crow. Americus is not unique but a case study of this New South city provides an opportunity to think about how the press constructed politicized ideas about black girlhood, particularly emphasizing aggression and violence despite the realities of vulnerability. At the same time, reading this reporting ‘against the grain' also opens up questions about black girls' self-assertion despite the dangers of a formalizing system of modern white supremacy.

“Suppression, Deference, and Courage: The Ethics of Love Canal”

Christie M. Kleinmann, Ph.D., APR

Faculty

Belmont University

Session type: Regular

Paper Award Runner-up: David Sloan Award for outstanding faculty research paper

Abstract: In the summer of 1978, the same documented evidence of chemical contamination confronted four actors at Love Canal: Hooker Chemical, New York State Health Commissioner David Axelrod, cancer researcher Beverly Paigen, and Niagara Gazette reporter Michael Brown. Each responded differently. This paper examines those differences through two complementary frameworks: Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development and Aristotelian virtue ethics, supplemented by Patrick Plaisance's empirical study of ethical exemplars in journalism and public relations. Drawing on congressional testimony, corporate documents, federal court findings, and primary journalistic accounts, the analysis finds that Hooker's preconventional reasoning produced suppression; Axelrod's conventional reasoning produced deference; and Paigen's and Brown's postconventional reasoning produced sustained action despite professional cost. Virtue ethics identifies what those patterns of choice revealed: the absence of justice in Hooker's conduct, the abandonment of phronesis in Axelrod's, and courage as a habitual orientation in Paigen's and Brown's.

“Who Counts at the Paper of Record? Recognition, Gender, and Institutional Belonging in Times Talk, 1947–1980”

Yelena Dzhanova

Student

Temple University

Session type: Regular

Abstract: This article uses Times Talk — an in-house publication of The New York Times — to examine how journalistic institutions construct professional belonging through internal media. Drawing on archival analysis from 1947 to 1980, the study asks how institutions determine who "counts" as a journalist. It argues that Times Talk functioned as a key site of institutional self-representation, producing and stabilizing hierarchies of recognition through recurring narratives, visual conventions, and linguistic patterns. Across features celebrating foreign correspondents, crisis reporting, technological infrastructure, and employee longevity, the publication consistently elevated male journalists as embodiments of professional authority while relegating women to marginal, relational, or affective roles. Situating these patterns alongside a 1974-1978 gender discrimination lawsuit against the newspaper, the article traces both continuity and change in institutional representation. While women became more visible in the transformation, in which expanded representation coexisted with enduring gendered hierarchies.

“"Jimmy Carter … Dies at 100": Obituary Coverage and The Remaking of a President”

Amber Roessner, Ph.D.

Faculty

University of Tennessee

Jason Guthrie, Ph.D.

Knoxville; Clayton State University

Session type: Regular

Abstract: Drawing upon textual analysis and public memory, this study examines obituary and funeral coverage of former president Jimmy Carter States. After nearly a decade of covering the imminence of Carter's death, journalists—some of whom had covered Carter's political career—offered second-draft rewrites, tentatively remaking his one-term presidency and casting the former president as one of the nation's greatest leaders. Carter's obituary writers and their expert sources, including family, advisors, journalists, politicians, biographers, and historians, served as cultural bricoleurs by sharing selective memories to craft their overwhelmingly positive portrait of the former president. The messier chapters of Carter's life and more complex parts of his character were largely overlooked as journalists embraced a simplistic shorthand of good and decent man … a middling president turned peacemaker, who after a tumultuous single term rewrote the meaning of a successful post presidency.

“Who Builds the Archive? Journalism History, Digitization, and the Case for Scholar-Built Research Environments”

Julien Gorbach, Ph.D.

Faculty

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Session type: Regular

Abstract: The digitization of historical newspapers has transformed journalism history research in ways the field has not yet fully theorized. A second transformation is now underway, as artificial intelligence begins to reshape what can be asked of historical sources. Once again, the infrastructure is being built — by computer scientists, archivists, and platform developers — without sufficient input from the journalism historians who understand what the research actually requires. This paper reports on the experience of building NewsAgents.org, an AI-assisted research environment for journalism history, and presents four lessons that emerged from that process as completed research findings: that the pipeline is the whole ballgame; that subject-matter expertise cannot be added after the fact; that the entry problem is an architecture problem; and that agents are historiography, not technology. Taken together, these lessons make a single argument: journalism historians must build the research environments their field needs, rather than waiting for others to build them.

“Civil Rights and Advocacy Journalism in the Dallas Express, 1964-1970”

J. Anthony Guillory

Faculty

The Citadel Military College of South Carolina

Session type: Regular

Abstract: This article examines the Dallas Express as an example of African American-centered advocacy journalism in Texas from 1964 to journalistic landscape of Dallas and North Texas. Beginning in 1967, personnel changes in Express leadership coincided with noticeable gaps in Express staff's coverage of significant local news stories, which created opportunities for other media outlets to compete for the Dallas' African American readership. Despite these challenges, the Dallas Express continued to serve as another element African American leadership in Dallas that advocated for the use of nonviolent direct-action forms of protest, illuminated the role of structural racism and police violence as contributors to urban unrest, and the repudiation of elements of African American protest that it deemed harmful to civil rights goals or dangerous to community members.

“Pursuing Law and Order in Spanish Cuba: The Colonial Communications of Mariano Ricafort and Miguel Tacón, 1832-1838”

Anna E. Lindner, Ph.D.

Faculty

Nazareth University

Session type: Regular

Abstract: As territories across the Americas and Caribbean freed themselves from European rule, Cuba remained firmly under the thumb of the Spanish Empire. Enslaved Africans, as well as free Black people and even some whites, increasingly agitated against Spanish rule. Between Tacón as the capitanes generales, governors, of Cuba. Both men restricted freedom of the press; regulated the movement of Black people from nearby territories like Jamaica; enriched themselves by allowing the trade in Africans to continue illegally; and expanded the Spanish army in Cuba. This essay applies the microtextual approach to official decrees and accounts issued by these men's administrations, with the aim of unveiling the colonial fictions propagated by the authorities. Dissecting Ricafort and Tacón's rhetoric, this essay problematizes their reductive portrayals of people of color and other marginalized groups during a politically contentious time in Cuban history.

“"Where were their Guardian Angels?" Tracing the Seduction of "Fallen Women" in New York City, 1830-1850”

Mark Bernhardt

Faculty

Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi

Session type: High Density

Abstract: During the Antebellum era, New York City had a reputation as a place where women fell victim to seduction. However, some questioned whether a stark contrast regarding seduction existed between the city and rural America. They pointed out that many women had come to New York after being seduced in their hometowns. This paper examines newspaper reports and seduction stories inspired by the news between 1830 and 1850 that offer examples of how family, community, and/or church as institutions of social control failed to protect women, both in New York and small towns. Connecting sexual regulation and the fear of what happened to seduced women to the public perception of a specific place, New York City, as constructed through the press and other writings, it becomes apparent that place mattered little when it came to women's vulnerability to sexual exploitation and the resulting social condemnation.

“"The most racist judgment of the century": Lum v. Rice (1927) and the Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans in the press”

Darren Chan

Student

Temple University

Session type: High Density

Abstract: The Supreme Court case of Lum v. Rice (1927) is one of the many attempts to challenge the legal basis of racial segregation of Jim Crow laws. Initiated by a Chinese family in the Mississippi Delta, the case not only shed light on the racial and legal status of non-White Americans in the South, but it also demonstrated how Asian Americans were racially positioned during a period of growing Anti-Asian sentiment. Drawing upon the concept of the field of racial positions, this study analyzed 20 editorials on the ruling from newspapers across the nation, which revealed how Asian Americans, despite not being as harshly ostracized as African Americans in the mainstream press, were still framed as incompatible with the United States. Meanwhile, opponents of the rulings, including several Black Press outlets, opted to valorize Asian Americans as a tool to highlight the problematic nature of segregation.

“Let's see those Beatles get out of this one': How Southern Bible Belt Newspapers Contributed to Moral Panic Following John Lennon's "Jesus" Statement”

Ian McKenzie

Student

University of Missouri

Session type: High Density

Abstract: In 1966, John Lennon was quoted, in part, as saying: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink." This study argues that newspaper coverage in the American South positioned Lennon's quote as a moral panic within the context of the religious crisis of the Lennon's quote may have contributed directly to the religious crisis by potentially causing a localized moral panic in the geographic areas under study. News content that discussed Lennon during this time positioned him as a moral outsider, giving authority to religious leaders, radio DJs, and (mostly teenage) Beatles fans. This study found that Lennon's quote can be considered as contributing to a moral panic via news coverage in three primary facets: Lennon's representational status, quotation practices, and sourcing.

“Viola Warren and the Oak Ridge Journal: "Soft News," Gendered Labor and War Journalism in Oak Ridge”

Joel Moroney

Student

University of Tennessee

Session type: High Density

Abstract: This paper illustrates how a woman journalist found agency as a serious journalist and historian by serial publication of the first draft of history of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II. It examines 117 issues of the Oak Ridge Journal weekly newspaper, from the inaugural issue on September 4, 1943 to the final Warren history column on November 8, 1945 to examine portrayal of Warren's life as an officer's wife, mother, woman's club officer, and journalist, as well as the 15 history columns published in the months surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima. It argues that the Oak Ridge Journal functioned as a gendered space of intellectual labor that was systematically dismantled in the post-war era to make way for a traditional, male-dominated professional hierarchy.

“When Cocoa Hit the Press: Early Journalism and the Dawn of Chocolate Culture in France, 1631-1700”

Ross F. Collins

Faculty

North Dakota State University

Session type: High Density

Abstract: By the nineteenth century France led the world in chocolate production, consumption, branding and advertising. But chocolate culture grew surprisingly slowly. How did this famous food from the New World reach Europe, and eventually to France? Historians are uncertain; solid evidence is hard to find. This research considers evidence through a new resource, French journalism. Early Paris newspapers beginning in the moved from monasteries and aristocrats to everyday use that became a storied part of French culinary and medical culture. The author considers primary written material as well as the three earliest newspapers published in Paris during the seventeenth century and early part of the eighteenth. Findings indicate chocolate followed a pattern of innovation from slow growth to quick acceptance, and in a new finding credits a well-known Paris merchant for bringing cocoa to the streets.

“Apotheosizing the Bitterness: Last Post of the Lost Cause, 1865-1904”

Thomas C. Terry, Ph.D.

Faculty

Utah State University

Session type: High Density

Abstract: The Lost Cause captured the southern white imagination the year after the Civil War, given a name by Edward Alfred Pollard in his book, The Lost Cause. This study looked at the coverage of the Lost Cause and charted its growth in 10-year increments from 1865-1904 in three newspapers representing the principal sections of the country during the Civil War: the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Atlanta Constitution through a content analysis of the terms the Lost Cause, General Grant, and General Lee. Now, in the third decade of the 21st Century, nearly 120 years later, after statues came down to redress the grievances of the past and finally bury the Lost Cause, some of those statutes are now going back up, along with its attitudes, and perhaps breathing a little life back into Confederate remembrances.

“The Americas: Latin American coverage in underground news”

Julia Longo

Student

Temple University

Session type: High Density

Abstract: During the Cold War, Latin America experienced military dictatorships, underground newspapers emerged in the United States alongside anti-war and countercultural movements. Produced largely by young, left-leaning, anti-establishment writers, these publications circulated counter-hegemonic narratives and engaged critically with international events in the Americas. This article presents original research analyzing how the U.S. underground press represented Latin America between realities shaped by authoritarianism in the South and liberal democratic freedoms in the North, these newspapers were able to articulate a discourse of camaraderie across the hemispheres. Through an analysis of the choice of language and images published in these papers, I argue that they contributed to imagining the Americas as a shared political and affective space.

“Remembering Against Oblivion: Early 1990s Media Coverage of the 1930s Kazakh Famine in Kazakhstan and Russia”

Aigerim Toleukhanova

Student

University of Maryland College Park

Session type: High Density

Abstract: This study explores media coverage in early 1990s newspapers from Kazakhstan and Russia about the famine of the 1930s, known in Kazakh as "Asharshylyq," which claimed the lives of up to 40 percent of the population, according to various estimates. The findings from 95 articles suggest significant differences in famine coverage across languages. Kazakh-language newspapers showed the real human face of famine victims' suffering through the testimonies of survivors, demographic data, poems, and music. In the Russian-language press in Kazakhstan, the testimonies of Russian-speaking peasants were more prominent, along with official documents. The Kazakh famine was rarely mentioned in Russian newspapers, unless written by a Kazakhstani author. This is the first study to focus on media coverage of the famine in the Soviet famine that affected the nomadic population.

“How student journalists weighed in during the height of McCarthyism: A case study”

Jenna Fisher

Student

University of Missouri

Session type: High Density

Abstract: McCarthyism did not simply shape national politics in the early 1950s. It also helped define what kinds of speech, dissent, and civic engagement felt safe in educational spaces, including student newspapers. Employing historical narrative analysis, the research evaluates over 50 archived digital and physical issues, this paper argues that the Principia Pilot, a student newspaper at a tiny, Christian liberal arts college, reveals how student journalists negotiated McCarthy-era pressure, and points to how they understood the role of the press, a central facet of news literacy. It argues that student journalists negotiated political pressures by using the press as a civic and educational tool for moral formation rather than as a watchdog. Key findings reveal three themes: nuanced international political analysis, advocacy for democratic integrity, and curiosity toward other cultures. This has implications to position news literacy education as a civic practice during times of political misinformation campaigns.

“’We’d had quite enough Colonial Hospitality’: Transnational reporting and the role of the

American Black Press in post-World War II Colonial Administration in West and Central African Colonies”

Anu Olagunju

Student

Temple University

Session type: High Density

Abstract: The growth of anti-colonialism and its ultimate expression in political mobilization for decolonization and independence of African colonies became pertinent and contingent after the wake of World War II. The war had exposed the illegitimacy of the colonial rule. This was also culminated by the injustices experienced by African soldiers drafted into the war. When in 1944–1945, a party of African American journalists visited West and Central African colonies, reporting back to the Afro-American, Norfolk Journal & Guide, and Chicago Defender, some locals looked to the visitors as representing a future free from colonial oppression. Using historical analysis, this study sheds light on the transnational vision of the U.S. Black press and the rise of “anti-colonial nationalism” that these newspaper reporters observed during their 1944-45 mission to Africa. The juxtaposition between Africans abroad (witnessing segregation), and Africans at home (under colonial rules) assumed a transnational subject of race equality.