With the AEJMC national conference in Washington, D.C. coming up next month, the History Division has created a guide to help separate the division’s activities from the larger conference program.

Designed by Vice-Chair/Research Chair Erika Pribanic-Smith, the History Division Program Guide provides a schedule of all paper presentations, including the titles and authors of all papers to be presented (on pages 1-3). It also includes a listing of all panels that the division is sponsoring (on page 4).

Furthermore, the guide features previews of the History Division Business Meeting (on page 3) and all of the special events that the division has planned (on page 4). Follow the orange hyperlinks in the document for more information, such as directions from the hotel to off-site activities.

We hope our members will find this guide helpful as they plan their time in Washington, D.C. We also encourage you to save the PDF to your phone or print it out to consult on site. Click here for the conference guide

(Photo: Nicolas Raymond | CC by SA 3.0)

Kristin L. Gustafson
Teaching Standards Chair
University of Washington Bothell
gustaf13@uw.edu

When I heard the news of five U.S. journalists killed on the job at their Capital Gazette newspaper, I thought of students who work for our campus news outlets and graduates who work in news organizations around the world.

I thought of the instinct of a journalist, such as Phil Davis, to tweet the news from under his desk while an active shooter moved through his newsroom. I thought, as Poynter Institute’s article that day reminded me, of how the shooting served “as a devastating reminder that journalism is difficult and dangerous work, performed in service to a greater good.”

In the days that followed, I thought of the physical threats and violence against journalists and their organizations, told through documentaries such as “No se mata la verdad” / “You cannot kill the truth” and through data such as those published by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

I thought of the legal and economic pressures making news reporting difficult in 2018. I thought of verbal threats happening as recently as June: people heckling journalists at rallies; a president describing journalists as the enemy of the people; a public call—made a day before the Capital Gazette shooting—for vigilantes to gun down journalists on sight. And I also thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Wells-Barnett’s story of resisting attacks inspired me during my Master of Arts education more than a decade ago when I looked at whether and how journalists spoke about lynching. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931)—a journalist, newspaper editor and owner, suffragist, sociologist, early leader in Civil Rights Movement, and one of NAACP’s founding members—was born to slaves in Mississippi, became college educated, and investigated and documented lynching.

She challenged dominant narratives of lynching and used direct prose to show how lynching was used to control and punish black people who competed with whites. (See Aptheker, Broussard, Giddings, Madison, NAACP, Ratzlaff, Roessner, Streitmatter, and Wells-Barnett herself for more.)

When a lynch mob killed three black men in Memphis in 1889, during the Reconstruction Era, Wells (later Wells-Barnett) encouraged readers to leave the city. About 6,000 residents left; other people boycotted. After she published an editorial in 1892 challenging the rape myth that had been repeatedly used to justify lynching, a white mob destroyed her press.

I tell this snippet of Wells-Barnett’s longer biography to my undergraduate students at the mid-way point of their quarter-long, basic-skills Introduction to Journalism class. For many of them, this is their first and only exposure to journalism within a program that takes a broad view of media and communication studies.

My questions for them following the first half of the Wells-Barnett story are these: Where did she publish after her presses were destroyed? Where and how did she speak? Answers to those two questions then inform new questions about journalism now: Who do we consider to be journalists today? What is their significance today? Where do they and can they publish? What is the context of our time period? Why is journalism relevant today?

As media historians, we know that threats against the press are not new. We know the merit of critiquing the press and challenging problematic reporting. However, examples such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett provide students and us context of the physical, economic, legal, political, and other kinds of threats made against journalists doing what can be “difficult and dangerous” work.

Historical understanding oftentimes cannot provide answers, or even hope, for these contemporary moments. But historical understanding can frame these moments and the role the press plays within a longer and broader arc.

Wells-Barnett left Memphis the year that the white mobs destroyed her newspaper operation. She never returned. Wells-Barnett continued her crusade in the U.S. Anti-Lynching Movement, and she kept working as a journalist. Living in Chicago, she published in two Black newspapers, The New York Age and the Chicago Conservator. She did two anti-lynching speaking tours to Europe in 1893 and 1894. Those tours garnered attention within U.S. mainstream newspapers. Soon the British Anti-Lynching Committee formed.

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs. Let’s share them with one another. As teaching standards chair, I invite you to write to me at gustaf13@uw.edu and tell me about your best practices that encourage pedagogues of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice.

Doug Cumming
Division Chair
Washington & Lee University

The recent transition of Clio Among the Media from a quarterly PDF to the monthly weblog you’re reading now is an experiment we will discuss at the division business meeting in Washington D.C. (Please plan to attend; Tuesday, Aug. 7, 6:45-8:15 p.m.)

You now have three examples of the new approach for May, June and this month, instead of a summer quarterly. For comparison, we have the quarterly Clio going back to 2002, edited each year by the “Secretary” who became Research Chair the following year, then Division Chair the next.

(In a related matter, I am hoping the Division will change the assignment of newsletter editorship, giving the job to the two Membership chairs for as long as they remain in that position. That’s a related discussion for our meeting, among proposed changes to the Constitution and Bylaws to be voted on at the meeting. These are changes that I, Vice Chair Erika Pribanic-Smith and Secretary Teri Finneman have agreed on and sent out to the membership.)

Both versions of Clio are linked on the archive page housed on the AEJMC-hosted History Division website. Items that are collected in the monthly issues appear, as soon as they are available, on the right side of the website under “Latest News” as items posted by Teri, the Clio editor this year. The newsletter is then published mid-month with a column by one of these chairs: Division chair, Teaching chair, Graduate chair or Professional Freedom & Responsibility chair.

In contrast, the quarterly PDF has customarily run all four columns.

I have been thinking through the implications of this experiment thanks to a lively email conversation with Teri, who took the initiative to try the new approach, and Erika, the incoming Division chair. Erika was way ahead of me in understanding the meaning of this change, having championed a similar transition of AJHA’s Intelligencer newsletter two years ago from a quarterly PDF to a blog.

I have come to recognize that comparing the two versions is the wrong way to frame the discussion.

There are advantages and disadvantages of both. I see now that with today’s interactive media technology, we have countless ways of blending or discarding elements of a newsletter and other forms of communication among members. As a former writer of two years of the “Teaching” column and an editor of Clio for a year, I don’t want to lose certain elements of the PDF quarterly. But I also appreciate Teri’s argument for change:

• Teri, like me and several others given the one-year editorship, had no knowledge of the Adobe InDesign desktop publishing program for the quarterly, so had the time-consuming job of finding an available designer to work with.
• A web-friendly copy-and-paste system is much simpler for future editors.
• “I think it would modernize the division more since other organizations also do e-newsletters.”
• It’s much easier to share digital content on social media, on our Facebook page or linked to a vita.
• More people will probably read that content if it’s broken into pieces in an e-newsletter.

I agree with these points. But I also come at this as a former magazine editor who came to appreciate the quarterly Clio as a good magazine-like product, treating the muse of history as a literal muse. Going back into the archive, I am impressed with how so many of the 1000-word columns and essays hold up over time.

I find the archive a pleasure to browse, though I admit it’s hard to search. I’m glad to see that old Teaching columns are now available in the “Teaching” pulldown menu of the home page.

I also liked having a familiar design that I could navigate, whether I read the PDF on the screen or printed it out. The format was a bit of a strait jacket for any incoming editor, but that was also an advantage, it seemed to me, for continuity.

A web-friendly newsletter, with items that can be posted quickly, is great for flexibility. That flexibility can mean that future editors can put their own stamp on the thing and make it what they want. So there’s no reason that the incoming editors – Amber Roessner, the Membership co-chair, and the nominated co-chair Julien Gorbach, of University of Hawai’i at Manoa – can’t encourage or assign columns like they were – first-person reflections on changes in our discipline running 1000 words or more.

In theory, at least, the content is the same, as Erika says. I say the medium is the message (not to be original).

Amber says she could probably go any way as the Division wishes – PDF or blog, short or long – but not do both quarterly and monthly. I agree. Maybe we could have a PDF with fewer pages, or cut it back to twice a year, or once a year – an annual. These are all suggestions of former Clio editors I’ve been in touch with.

We need to have a system that is enjoyable for the Clio editor(s) and useful for the Division. We want to grow the Division, welcome and inspire younger scholars and stay in touch with one another.

Gil Klein’s book, “Trouble in Lafayette Square: Assassination, Protest and Murder at the White House” follows the course of American history through true stories of incidents that happened in the park and surrounding homes across the street from the White House.

From assassination attempts on President Truman and Secretary of State William Seward, to a congressman killing the son of Francis Scott Key in broad daylight — and getting away with it — to the women’s suffrage movement that invented the White House protest, to the scandal that nearly brought down the Jackson administration, to enslaved people struggling for their freedom to a president who arranged a drug bust, Lafayette Square has been the backdrop of events small and large that have shaped the country.

All of this with a humorous forward by Washington Post Metro columnist John Kelly.

Copies available on Amazon.

Klein is launching the Washington program for the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is chairman of the National Press Club’s History and Heritage Committee.