HIST 712: US Civil War Era Research Seminar HIST 712 (Spring 2025)

VA newspapers, 1821-1935

This is an excellent collection of two- to three-page biographical sketches of 500 noteworthy journalists from 1690 to the present. . . . This book, cross-indexed several ways, may become the takeoff point for thousands of term papers and should be in reference collections, as well as in all serious media collections. Library Journal This comprehensive reference offers nearly 500 biographical sketches, with bibliography, of significant journalists in American history, past and present, living and dead. Its subjects are drawn from the major mass media, including newspapers, radio, television, magazines, and film, and it provides a thorough representation of the various subfields of American journalism, such as reporters, editors, columnists, humorists, editorial cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, commentators, all types of correspondents, and sports journalists. Unlike similar volumes, this dictionary goes beyond the mainstream media to draw upon significant figures from the feminist and suffragist press, and the black press, and traces the development of American journalism from its beginning in Boston in 1690 to present global broadcast networks. The biographical sketches present perspectives on the lives of the people who help develop the big city and small city newspaper press, the regional press, the frontier press, the early radio and television news, and the radical and dissident press. Arranged alphabetically, each sketch includes a useful bibliography for further reference, and there is a general index as well as an appendix that lists the subjects according to media, professional fields and other categories. The broad scope of this valuable sourcebook will make it an indispensable aid in the fields of journalism and communications, and a useful addition to university and college libraries, metropolitan newspapers, national and local magazines, and broadcast networks and local stations in large cities.

American magazines got off to an auspicious start during the colonial era as the first two publications lasted for three, then six monthly issues respectively. Published by and for the new American aristocracy in a nation plagued by bad roads, poor postal service, and a population more concerned with settlement than style, most focused on political content. Though they employed the essay style popularized in England, they were designed to stimulate a new American literature. The persistence of the eras early pioneers paid off during the first half of the 19th century as American magazines emerged with their own editorial standards and a strong nationalist voice. This volume is the first of three devoted to American magazine editors and publishers of periodicals having substantial literary content. 46 entries include :William Bradford III, Mathew Carey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Sarah Josepha Hale, John Inman, Edgar Allan Poe, George Ripley, Ann Sophia Stephens and Noah Webster.

Although frequently attacked for their partisanship and undue political influence, the American media of today are objective and relatively ineffectual compared to their counterparts of two hundred years ago. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, newspapers were the republic's central political institutions, working components of the party system rather than commentators on it. The Tyranny of Printers narrates the rise of this newspaper-based politics, in which editors became the chief party spokesmen and newspaper offices often served as local party headquarters. Beginning when Thomas Jefferson enlisted a Philadelphia editor to carry out his battle with Alexander Hamilton for the soul of the new republic (and got caught trying to cover it up), the centrality of newspapers in political life gained momentum after Jefferson's victory in 1800, which was widely credited to a superior network of papers. Jeffrey L. Pasley tells the rich story of this political culture and its culmination in Jacksonian democracy, enlivening his narrative with accounts of the colorful but often tragic careers of individual editors.

During the years just before the Civil War, key newspapers in the United States became true mass media for the first time, reaching American society as never before. In Fanatics and Fire-eaters, Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., examine how this newly acquired power was used and how it exacerbated festering regional issues - preeminently the issue of slavery - as newspapers described and characterized some of the key events preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. Analyzing specific events, from the Brooks-Sumner incident to the attack on Fort Sumter, the authors provide a thorough and colorful background of the descent into war. Tracing political accounts and diatribes published in northern and southern newspapers from 1856 to the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861, Ratner and Teeter assert that newspapers, in their desire to be profitable and promote specific agendas, stoked the fires that heated tensions between North and South. Fanatics and Fire-eaters examines a time when the press gained greater influence and timeliness because of telegraph lines, steam-driven presses, and faster distribution via railroad networks.

     The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century traces the major transformation of newspapers from a politically based press to a commercially based press in the nineteenth century.  Gerald J. Baldasty argues that broad changes in American society, the national economy, and the newspaper industry brought about this dramatic shift.      Increasingly in the nineteenth century, news became a commodity valued more for its profitablility than for its role in informing or persuading the public on political issues.  Newspapers started out as highly partisan adjuncts of political parties.  As advertisers replaced political parties as the chief financial support of the press, they influenced newspapers in directing their content toward consumers, especially women.  The results were recipes, fiction, contests, and features on everything from sports to fashion alongside more standard news about politics.      Baldasty makes use of nineteenth-century materials--newspapers from throughout the era, manuscript letters from journalists and politicians, journalism and advertising trade publications, government reports--to document the changing role of the press during the period.  He identifies three important phases: the partisan newspapers of the Jacksonian era (1825-1835), the transition of the press in the middle of the century, and the influence of commercialization of the news in the last two decades of the century.

The third volume in The History of Journalism series, this work provides an overview of the period from 1833 to 1865 when major journalistic forces evolved within professional circles, reform movements, Southern nationalism, ethnic, religious and racial minorities. The transition from partisan press to commercial journalism, it is argued, was a gradual process that covered the entire popular press era from the founding of the penny newspapers in 1833 through the end of the Civil War in 1865. Newspapers reflected a diverse, multicultural society and numerous reform and partisan groups during the antebellum era. Civil War correspondents created a new power base, the reporter in the field, by occassionally sending reports independent from the views of their commanding officers and employing editors. The relationship between newspapers and the government and political parties remained a complex one, especially during the war when reporters demonstrated their independence if not their objectivity. Scholars and researchers of journalism history and of the American Civil war will appreciate this synthesis of journalism history during an important period in American history. Among the subjects covered are the New York newspaper wars, specialized publications, alternative newspapers, Western newspaper wars, reporters, officers, and soldiers in the field, and reflections on the popular press. A complete list of sources follows a bibliographical overview.