Browse

This book uses the Catholic parish to view Mexican immigration and ethnicity in the United States with a focus on Chicago. For Mexican immigrants, the parish had an Americanizing influence on its members. At the same time, many Mexican Americans gained a sense of mexicanidad by participating in the parish’s religious and social events. This process of building a Mexican identity and community in Chicago began in the 1920s. The first parishes served as refuges and as centers of community and identity. Mexicans fiercely attached themselves to specific parishes in Chicago, much like European American groups before them. The book explores how Chicago’s expanding Mexican Catholic population, contained in just two parishes prior to 1960, reshaped dozens of parishes and entire neighborhoods. The laity, often with Spanish-speaking clergy, made these parishes Mexican. The third largest archdiocese in the United States has, in many ways, become “Chicago católico,” a place where religious devotions hold sway well beyond church doors. With its century-old Mexican population, Chicago presaged a national trend. Today Latinos comprise 17 percent of the US population. This book’s parish-level research offers historic lessons for myriad communities currently undergoing ethnic succession and integration around the nation.

The Enforcers describes the problems with business journalism and its possible future by focusing on the little-studied genre of the trade press. A historical and normative analysis of business journalism frames a case study about a small but extraordinary trade newspaper, the National Thrift News, whose aggressive reporting on the savings-and-loan crisis contributed to the downfall of a corrupt banker, Charles Keating Jr., chairman of American Continental Corporation and owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan. The National Thrift News offers broader lessons for mainstream business journalism in that its newsroom envisioned investigative reporting as a commercial and market opportunity; the editor’s part-ownership of the newspaper allowed the staff to take risks. The National Thrift News defied a long-standing narrative that trade publications are captive to the industries they cover; the case study provides new evidence of accountability and investigative journalism in the trade press. It explores the complex relationships and interactions between businesspeople and the press, how their fortunes can rise and fall as a result of similar economic forces, and how their roles in the capitalist system create tension and put them at odds with one another. This book makes the case that business journalism must evolve from its origins as market servant and become a market watchdog.

This book addresses the role of media, particularly periodicals, in the American women’s suffrage movement, and in public understandings of the campaign for a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Chapters deal with the rhetoric of pro- and antisuffrage activists as covered in the mainstream regional and national press; several chapters deal with suffragists’ own periodicals, as well as with other non-mainstream periodicals, including the black press and socialist and radical periodicals. These new studies offer fresh perspectives on relatively familiar suffrage narratives while exploring lesser-known aspects of the roles of journalism, publicity, visual communication, and external alliances with organizations and individuals. Taken collectively, the chapters clarify intersections of suffrage ideas with other social and political movements as well as differences by geography and culture. The essays are marked by attention to the movement’s long-term implications; to contemporary concepts such as social movement and countermovement strategies, status conflict, and the public sphere; and by sensitivity to race, class, and regional politics. As the historiography offered here makes clear, these issues were largely ignored in the first wave of suffrage research.

This book explores sensationalism as it took hold of U.S. media between 1870 and 1900. During this period, print news publishers became adept at translating stories about sex, crime, and violence into emotion-based pictures. Analysis of significant episodes in media history shows how a range of news media producers engaged with the sensational style. As they pioneered the art of visual journalism, news publishers conveyed racial, class, and gender anxieties in a complex dialogue with audiences that established precedents for modern media. Prominent cases – obscenity litigation, anti-Chinese violence, the Ghost Dance, Jim Crow-era lynching, and domestic violence – demonstrate how efforts to maximize the dramatic power of the news transformed everyday reporting and established standards for visual journalism. Commercial newspaper editors exploited sensationalism’ economic benefits, while marginalized groups and social activists experimented with its power to challenge negative stereotyping and mobilize their own constituencies. By the 1890s, a wide range of publications had come to embrace, adapt, and expand the sensational style through news illustration – albeit in different ways for different audiences. The patterns prevalent in entertainment publications infiltrated the commercial dailies, and even low-budget political news sheets: few publications could afford to resist borrowing from the sensational toolkit. As sensationalism increasingly pervaded visual journalism, the very nature of the news changed.