Journalism History

An esteemed activist invites us to consider the complex idea of abolition as much more than a strategy or a set of tactics—at a deeper level, abolition is an entire political framework, culture, and orientation.

In the second half of 2020 and continuing into 2021, protests against racial injustice spread across the United States after the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis Police Department officers. What transpired during this troubled time cast a bright light on the contemporary relationship between the press and police in the United States. The relationship between these two fundamental institutions is, however, a long and complicated one.

Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere - rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives - are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator.

In the era of Watergate and rising feminist awareness, reporter Pam Zekman was queen of the muckrakers. Her biggest investigation: buy a bar, document the inevitable city department shakedowns and bribes, and publicly document Chicago’s institutionalized corruption. Her epic story changed Chicago and also raised serious questions about the future of journalism.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.

Writer Michael Tallen is burnt out. He’s been trying to write a novel his whole life but to no avail and is now reduced to churning out ‘fluff piece’ articles for a small-time local paper. Things take an odd turn when Katz, his boss, sends him on a new assignment. For some unknown reason, an elderly woman in town asks for Michael specifically to help her pen a book about her life. Caught off guard and hesitant by this request, his curiosity is piqued when Ruth starts to share her story of growing up in the circus during the 1930’s. He agrees to write her book but soon realizes there...

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

The amazing story behind the greatest newspaper men to ever live, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, lies primarily hidden with their reporters who were in the field. They risked their lives in Cuba as the country grappled for independence simply to “get the story” and write what was not always the most accurate story, but definitely the best. Anything to sell papers. Reporters like Harry Scovel, Stephen Crane, Cora Taylor, Richard Harding Davis, and James Creelman, among others, put themselves in danger every day just for the news.

Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage, this book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges.

“Different People” is an anthology of interviews by Swedish author Carl Abrahamsson, focusing on art, life and the creative process. Included are in-depth conversations with Conrad Rooks, Malcolm McLaren, Stelarc, John Duncan, Charles Gatewood, Mark McCloud, Ralph Metzner, Peter Beard, Bill Landis, Ralph Gibson, Maja Elliott, Michael Bowen, Bob Colacello, Dian Hanson, Anton Corbijn, June Newton, Kendell Geers, Simeon Coxe III (Silver Apples), Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), and Brian Williams (Lustmord). These groundbreaking artists, writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, ...

North America stands at the crossroads between duty and detachment amidst the chaos of the Great War. Step into this tumultuous world in A Tale of Two Nations: Canada, U.S. and WWI. Experience history as it unfolded, unfiltered by hindsight, through the lens of contemporary newspapers. This meticulously researched work illuminates developments from 1914 to 1918, offering a dual perspective – one American, one Canadian – to reveal the stark contrasts and surprising parallels in their wartime experiences. Delve into the fevered headlines and heartfelt stories that depicted two pivotal ...

A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a 25-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she traveled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and other countries scarred by violence, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world and laboring to tell its stories.

In The Hearsts: Father and Son, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and co-author Jack Casserly tell the extraordinary story of an American family from the gold-diggings of California to the present Hearst media empire. They also profile a cavalcade of reporters and columnists who became the stars of the Hearst newspapers, and portray the colorful New York nightlife of the 1930s and 1940s.

Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In Under Fire, Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.

Now an insider at The People vs. O. J. Simpson reveals the untold story of the most widely followed trial in American history and the indelible impact it has had on the judiciary, the media, and the public. As the Los Angeles Superior Court's media liaison, Jerrianne Hayslett had unprecedented access to the trial - and met with Judge Lance Ito daily - as she attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, to mediate between the court and members of the media and to balance their interests.

In his #1 New York Times best seller, Bias, Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg created a national firestorm when he exposed the liberal biases of the so-called mainstream media. Now, in his new blockbuster, Goldberg goes even further. He not only takes on Big Journalism, but offers a twelve-step program to help the media elites overcome their addiction to bias.

Originally, The Motherland Saga ended in 1983, and what came thereafter was a brief epilogue. However, the past thirty-eight years have witnessed unimaginable changes in the fabric of the people, the culture, and the politics of Turkey. The emerging history of this great land compelled the writing of this fourth volume, THE FOOTSTEPS OF FOREVER. While the period from 2005 to 2020 has witnessed a sea change in the fortunes of this tortured nation and what appears to be a complete reversal in Turkey’s international alliances and its worldview, THE FOOTSTEPS OF FOREVER, Volume Four of the ...

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a definitive collector's edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story.

The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? draws on the voices of individual working people to tell the stories left out of standard histories of that era, and helps us imagine how to address our own failed economy, and how to imagine and build movements challenging it that do not themselves replicate racism and patriarchy.