Current Issue: Summer 2024
Vol. 41, Issue 3
Summer 2024
ARTICLES
Before the Environment Was News: Outdoor Writers and the Boundaries of Journalism
Suzannah Evans Comfort
Outdoor writing is a little respected and often forgotten genre of American newsmaking. Widely popular in the early to middle twentieth century, outdoor journalists presented a blend of factuality with personal narrative and advocacy for environmental preservation as they told stories of fishing, hunting, and the outdoors more broadly in columns tucked away in the sports section. Outdoor columns were the single most consistent source of environmental newsmaking in US newspapers until the late 1960s, when news organizations started assigning journalists working in the news section to the environmental beat. But because outdoor columnists violated norms of twentieth century newsmaking by including advocacy and personal narrative in their columns, their contributions have been overlooked. This study, which draws on the organizational archives of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, demonstrates that outdoor writers were deeply engaged with the concept of “news” even from their position as delegitimized actors within the news ecosystem. As a result, an historic account of the outdoor writing profession provides a fruitful site of inquiry to examine norms of journalism, boundaries of the field, legitimacy, and ultimately power.
Women’s Entrée into Advertising Through the Brand Test Kitchen
Lisa Mullikin Parcell & Paul Myers
As branded food products spread in the early 1900s, advertisers began speaking directly to women shoppers. Adopting a women-advertising-to-women approach, national brands and advertising agencies hired home economics professionals and charged them with creating test kitchens to develop and test recipes, write advertising copy, correspond with consumers, and test products. They became the face and voice of brands, providing women entrée into the male-dominated advertising profession. These professional women brought an understanding of the needs of the housewife, knowledge of the emerging fields of dietetics and home economics, and a scientific approach to solving “home problems.” Brand test kitchens became a symbol of trust, signifying that the product was reliable, pure, and economical. Today major food brands such as Kraft, Heinz, General Mills, and Kellogg’s still maintain test kitchens to meet consumer needs, educate consumers on proper product use, and produce new branded recipes.
“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age
Lorraine Ahearn
In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.
Historians have documented that newspaper editorials and radio commentaries played a role in turning public opinion against Japanese Americans and pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt into interning them during World War II. But what has been overlooked were the efforts of a few reporters who fought to reverse journalistic and public opinion regarding the government-sanctioned, racially-inspired injustice. This study documents the work of the unsung journalists—some who addressed a limited forum and others with a national audience—who sought to end the internments and secure restoration of Japanese Americans’s civil rights. By doing so, these reporters fulfilled one of the press’s most sacred responsibilities to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Although these journalists failed to secure freedom for the internees during the war years—these reporters eventually helped restore the dignity and constitutional rights of Japanese Americans by speaking on their behalf.
BOOK REVIEWS
The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man
edited by Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini with the Rev. Paul Walker, University of Georgia Press, 2020, 264 pp.
Cathy M. Jackson
How America Gets the News: A History of U.S. Journalism
Ford Risley and Ashley Walter, Rowman and Littlefield, 2024, 238 pp.
Jason Lee Guthrie
Published by the Author: Self-publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
by Bryan Sinche, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 258 pp.
Maurine H. Beasley
American Literary Misfits: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Print Cultures
by D. Berton Emerson, University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 236 pp.
Jon Bekken
Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence: The Diaries of the Moravian Mission to the Iroquois Confederacy, 1745–1755
edited and translated by Katherine M. Faull, Penn State University Press, 2024, 260 pp.
Grace Burich
A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America
by Steve Suitts, NewSouth Books, University of Georgia Press, 2024, 544 pp.
Janet Dagley
Behind the Scenes: Covering the JFK Assassination
by Darwin Payne, Denton, Texas, University of North Texas Press, 2023, 306 pp.
Tracy Lucht
DIGITAL MEDIA REVIEWS
Victim/Suspect
directed by Nancy Schwartzman, Netflix (2023)
Josalyn McMillan
Critical Role
https://critrole.com/
Hayley McCullough
ENDNOTES
Endnotes