Program

The Joint Meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association

And

The AEJMC History Division

Fordham University

March 18, 2006

 

Opening Location:  Rooms 520, 521 & 522, 113 West 60th Street (Corner of 60th St. and Columbus Ave.), New York, NY 10023

 

Conference Chair and Program Organizer: Elliot King

 Loyola College in Maryland  eking@loyola.edu  Tel: 410-356-3943 Cell: 443-858-3731

 

(Conference hosted by the Center for Communication, Fordham Business.  Site Coordinator:  Jim Eggensperger,  Iona College)

 

8:30 AM-9:00 AM   Registration (Fee: $40, cash or checks only. Make checks payable to Loyola. College, AJHA)

 

9:00 AM – 9:10 AM  Opening Address  Elliot King (Loyola College in Maryland)

 

9:10 AM – 10:30 PM  Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtables One, Two and Three

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable One  Room 520   Magazines and Publications  (Moderator: Frank Fee, University of North Carolina)

 

Arthur Hayes (Fordham University) The Rise and Fall of Brill’s Content. This article examines the history of press-media reviews ending with Brill’s Content, concluding that though the mass audience exists for such publications, a critical mass of advertisers does not.

 

Barbara Reed (Rutgers University) Everywhere a Foreigner and Yet Nowhere a Stranger.  This paper concerns the Civil War was covered by the (London) Jewish Chronicle, and the particular issues of interest to two communities in both countries.

 

Devon J. Powers (New York University)  Finding Its Voice: Music Journalism in the Village Voice, 1955-1965. This paper examines the pre-history and foundational years of the Village Voice in light of its contemporary intellectual, cultural, and social movements.

 

Kimberly Donaldson (SUNY, Stony Brook)  The View From The Ladder.  The Ladder, a lesbian magazine published from 1956 to 1972, provides a unique look at identity and community building within a discursive space.

 

Nathaniel Frederick II (Penn State University)  Envisioning the Black Metropolis: Half-Century Magazine Encourages Economic Empowerment 1916-1924. This study examines how Half-Century Magazine, encouraged readers to take advantage of segregation through entrepreneurship at a time when the African-American middle-class was gaining economic prominence.

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Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Two Room 521 Big Pictures (Moderator: Eugenia Palmegiano,  St. Peter’s College)

 

Chris Daly (Boston University) A Theory of Change in U.S. Journalism History.  Over 300 years, the news media have passed through the major phases of the nation's other businesses, with implications in each phase for the definition of news, the practices of newsgathering, and the relationship between the news media and other powerful institutions.

 

Stefan Cieply (University of Virginia) Henry Wolf and Esquire: Towards a Critical History of Art Direction in Periods. This paper will use Henry Wolf's tenure as Esquire's Art Director to initiate a discussion of why a history of art direction in magazines is needed and what this history may look like.

 

David Abrahamson (Northwestern University)  The History of the Diverted Pyramid.  Evidence exists to suggest that the second half of the 20th century saw a renewed emphasis on more writerly forms in journalism. This paper re-examine the history of the issue of literary/writerly influences on the construction of new writing.

 

David Greenberg (Rutgers University)  The Roots of ‘The Liberal Media’ in Civil Rights Coverage. The paper explores how national press coverage of the civil rights movement helped lead white Southerners and other conservative Americans to view the news media as liberally biased.

 

 

 

Scholar to Scholar Roundtable Three Room 522 Business and Culture (Moderator: Joe Marren, Buffalo State College)

 

Aurora Wallace (New York University) The 1945 New York Newspaper Strike and the City. The 1945 newspaper strike in New York is a particularly salient moment in journalism history showing the important place once occupied by the newspaper in everyday life and the interdependence of systems in the city’s infrastructure. 

 

Dave Kaszuba (Susquehanna University) Editor and Publisher’s 1922-23 Campaign Against the “Evil” of PR. My research looks at a two-year barrage of stinging criticism that Editor and Publisher leveled against the growing public relations industry in the mid-1920s and corrects the false impression that the emergence of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays around this same time period resulted in a smooth, quick and almost magical acceptance of PR as a respected profession.

 

Jane McConnell (Minnesota State University) Back to the Bottom Line: Journalism Ethics Codes Re-embrace Business Values.  This study examines newspaper and press association codes of ethics in the United States and describes and analyzes the remarkable similarity between those from the early twenty-first century and those from the 1910s.

 

Thorin Tritter (Princeton University)  Carving a New Path: The Business Model Pioneered by New York City’s Mainstream Press

 

Steve Byers (Marquette University)  Fruits of Diversity: Different Tactics Shape a Vigorous Press in Milwaukee. This paper looks at how competition and opposing visions built success for Milwaukee's black press.

 

 

10:30-10:45 Break

 

10:45-12:10  Panel Discussion One and Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Four

 

10:50—12:10  Panel: Diverse Voices from Underused Archives Room 520 (Moderator: Maurine Beasley, University of Maryland)

 

 

History of Ethnic Indian Programming in USA: Indira Somani (University of Maryland)

This presentation involves the history of public television programming about India in the United States, using the National Public Broadcasting archives and materials at the Library of Congress. 

 

History of Coverage of Space exploration in USA: A R Hogan (University of Maryland) This presentation will explore a treasure house of more than 40,000 reel-to-reel audio tapes of  late-20th-century radio news coverage in the University of Maryland's Broadcasting Archives. This material has been almost untapped by journalism history researchers. He will focus particularly on coverage of the beginnings of outer space exploration.

 

Internationalization of Sesame Street: Priyanka Matanhelia (University of Maryland) The Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) collection at the National Public Broadcasting Archives provides the rich history of how it began and achieved its success. This presentation will offer a brief overview of  materials included in the CTW collection and explain how researchers can find them relevant for understanding Sesame Street today.

 

The Television Oral History Project: Margot Hardenbergh (Fordham University) With the support of grants from the Markle Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the McGannon Center has been developing an archive of in-depth interviews with important figures in the history and development of the television industry in the United States, with a particular emphasis on regulation and policy issues and events.  These interviews are being archived at Fordham University's Walsh Library, and ultimately will be available on-line for research and teaching purposes.

 

 

Respondant:  Nancy Roberts (University at Albany)

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Four Room 521 Biography  (Moderator: Susan Keith, Rutgers University)

 

Beth Haller  (Towson University) The Right Time to be a Deaf Journalist. This paper explores the journalism of Laura Catherine Redden, a deaf woman who worked as a journalist beginning in 1857 and went on to cover the Civil War and work as a Washington correspondent and foreign correspondent.

 

Genevieve McBride (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)  The First Mayor of Black Milwaukee, the “Selma of the North”: Journalist J. Anthony Josey.

 

Jan Whitt  (University of Colorado)   The Orchid Thief:  Susan Orlean’s Personal Allegory

 

Jane Chapman (University of Lincoln)  The American Muckraker, the Prize-Winning Novelist, the Penniless Documentarian, and the Censored Filmmaker: Elements of Activist Journalism Old and New.

 

Myna German  (Delaware State University) Katherine Graham and the Washington Post:  How Did a Timid Wife Become a Major Publisher

 

12:10-1:30   Lunch (South Lounge)

 

Luncheon Speaker:  Everette Dennis, Felix E. Larkin Distinguished Professor, Fordham Business

 

Topic:  Does Institutional Memory Matter Anymore?

 

 

1:30-2:40  Panel Two  and Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtables Five and Six

 

Panel Two: All the Protest Fit for Print?: Partisan News Coverage in the  
Vietnam Era Room 520
(Moderator: John McMillian, Harvard University)

 

John McMillian  (Harvard University) Strategic Myths and Justificatory Fictions: LNS at the Battle of the Pentagon.  This paper briefly narrates how Liberation News Service was founded, and then examines its coverage of a famous antiwar rally at the Pentagon in October 1967.

 

Andrew J. Huebner (Brown University)   The Perplexing War: American Media Coverage of Vietnam, 1965-1968.  Many scholars and other observers of American press coverage of the Vietnam War have criticized the wartime media for showing either too much or too little. This paper stakes out a middle ground, accepting and modifying elements of both positions in this highly partisan debate.

 

William Gillis (Independent)  The Great Printing Press Union Revolt of 1970:  Scanlan’s Monthly Magazine, Government Harassment, and Censorship.  In the fall of 1970, dozens of U.S. printing presses refused to handle an issue of the magazine Scanlan's Monthly, forcing the publication to print the issue in Canada, where it was subjected to further censorship.

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Five:  Visual Culture Room 521 (Moderator: Stefan Cieply, University of Virginia)

 

Berkley Hudson (University of Missouri)  Hambone and the Ku Klux Clan in 1922: James P. Alley¹s Cartoons of a Southern White Conservative Mentality and the Pulitzer Prize.  In 1923, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis received the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal of Public Service, in part for its courageous attitude in the publication of cartoons about the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, cartoonist James Alley’s Hambone¹s Meditation was a version of blackface minstrelsy in cartoon form.

 

Michelle Gibbons (University of Pittsburgh)  The American Phrenological Journal and 19th Century Visual Culture.  This paper will explore the phrenological notion of head shaping, and its implications for our understanding of visual culture by examining a regularly circulating nineteenth-century periodical, the American Phrenological Journal. 

 

Richard K. Popp (Temple University)  Myth and Narrative in Newsmagazines’ Photographic Coverage of Hurricanes, 1935-2005. This presentation offers a discussion of myth, national narratives, and disorder as portrayed in photo-journalistic coverage of hurricanes over the previous 70 years.

 

Sheila Webb (Marquette University)  Life Magazine’s Small Town America:  A Pictorial Myth.  The small town continues to occupy a mythic place in American life and culture. This study argues that the contemporary version of the myth of small town as ideally American was codified in the decades between the First and Second World Wars and that Life magazine played a role in how that ideal was visualized.

 

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Six Room 522 Contexts (Moderator: James Eggensberger, Iona College)

 

Edward Alwood (Quinnipiac University) Spying on the Press: FBI Surveillance of Newspapers in the 1940s.  This study of FBI surveillance of newspapers and individual journalists during the 1940s shows how the FBI assembled a trove of derogatory information that fueled government witch-hunts for Communists in the press during the McCarthy era.

 

Nathan Godfried (University of Maine)  Broadcast Journalism and Organic Intellectuals:  Leftist Radio News Commentators 1945-1950.  This paper analyzes the background and work of three local radio news commentators who challenged the emerging Cold War orthodoxy of the United States in the late 1940s.

 

Tim Vos  (Seton Hall University)  The Idea of ‘Public’ in the Origins of a Commercial Broadcast System. This paper seeks to discern how ‘public’ was understood in early attempts to craft broadcast policy.

 

Tom Terry  (University of North Carolina)   That Sounded the Charge:  Two Black and Two White Newspapers Confront the Ku Klux Klan in the Early 1950s. This paper examines the coverage of four North Carolina weekly newspapers, two white and two black, and explores the conditions that led to the awarding of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service being to the white newspapers only.

 

 

 

 

2:50-4:15  Panel Three and Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtables Seven and Eight

 

 

Panel Three: The Trials and Tribulations of Researching the Cold War (Room 520) (Moderator: Lisa Burns)

 

This panel discuss the difficulties in researching the Cold War era, especially when it comes to accessing archival materials from this period.    The panelists will talk about their experiences conducting archival research, sharing their success stories, as well as their frustrations, and offering suggestions for researchers from various disciplines who are considering Cold War projects.
 
 Presenters:   Edward Alwood, Quinnipiac University
                      John Jenks, Dominican University

 
                      Stacey Cone, University of Iowa 

 
                      Lisa M. Burns, Quinnipiac University

 

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Seven:  Journalism with Perspective (Room 521 (Moderator: Aurora Wallace New York University)

 

Kalen Churcher (Pennsylvania State University)  You Have the Right to Remain Silent or You May Choose to Put Your Words in Print: The Rikers Review and the prison press as advocacy journalism.  This research paper describes how the advocacy aspect of prison reform was woven into the Riker’s Review in a fashion similar to how black, abolitionist and suffragist newspapers presented their own constituencies’ crusades.

 

Juanita Darling (California State University, Monterey Bay) Revolution, Radio, and Religion in El Salvador’s Civil War.  This paper examines the relationship between religion and radio in a rebellion that relied as much on persuasion as military prowess. Roman Catholic Church leaders conferred legitimacy on the rebellion in El Salvador as they were quoted or even spoke on the rebel radio and Radio Venceremos told an international community about abuses against the church.

 

Richard Lee (Rutgers University) Media Coverage of Domestic U.S. Military Bases and How it Supports the Military Industrial Complex.  Through an analysis of news stories on plans to close U.S. military bases, the paper will demonstrate how the American media has helped build support for war and contributed to a culture in which the military is ingrained.

 

Elizabeth Skewes (University of Colorado) Presidential News Coverage During Crisis: America Under Attack.  This study examines the similarities and differences in the framing and news coverage of Franklin D. Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

 

Theresa Lynch (University of New Hampshire)    This is Our Cambodia.   The presentation is an examination of Nixon's and Rockefeller's responses to the media's coverage of the 1971 Attica prison uprising and massacre and the resulting resolve by many journalists to continue to cover the Attica story to elucidate prison reform issues, prison crisis handling, and the role of the media in raising public awareness.

 

 

Scholar-to-Scholar Roundtable Eight:   Women’s Focus  Room: 522 (Moderator: Nancy Roberts, University at Albany)

 

Julie B. Lane (University of Wisconsin) Women in the Middle: The Abortion Debate in Women’s Magazines, 1965-1976.  This paper discusses the approaches two women's magazines with divergent perspectives and audiences--Cosmopolitan and Ladies' Home Journal--took toward coverage of abortion as current-day ideological divisions began to form around the issue between 1965 and 1976.

 

Karen Dearlove (McMaster University)    Gender, Politics and Policy: American Journalistic Perceptions of European International Relations in the works of Dorothy Thompson and Anne O’Hare McCormick.  This paper is a comparison of Anne O'Hare McCormick and Dorothy Thompson's journalistic writings and experiences as female journalists in the 1930s

 

Kimberly Wilmont Voss (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville)  Marie Anderson: Transforming the Mission of the 1950s and 1960s Women’s Pages.  This paper chronicles the career of influential Miami Herald women’s page editor Marie Anderson. She broke barriers and encouraged the inclusion of hard news in women’s sections in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Norman Lewis (University of Maryland)    From Cheesecake to Chief: Newspaper Editors’ Slow Acceptance of Women as Seen through the ASNE Bulletin.  The roots of enduring newsroom prejudice against women can be found in exploring the real attitudes of the men editing the nation's leading newspapers.

 

 

4:30-5:00  Closing Presentation:

 

REBUFFING REFUGEE JOURNALISTS: THE PROFESSION’S FAILURE TO HELP JEWS PERSECUTED BY NAZI GERMANY

 

Laurel Leff, Northeastern University

 

 

Post Conference Walking Tour—Thorin Tritter of Princeton University and a professional guide has graciously agreed to lead people on a tour of Central Park.

 

(Special thanks to Everette Dennis, Center for Communication, Fordham Business, Barbara Reed, Rutgers University,  Jim Eggensperger, Iona College, Stefan Cieply, University of Virginia)