The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2026 AEJMC conference in New Orleans. Attendance at the conference is encouraged as the winner will be honored at a History Division awards event.

Book authorship is defined as the person or persons who wrote a book. Edited collections with substantial chapter contributions by the editors may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The competition is open to any author of a media history book regardless of whether they belong to AEJMC or the History Division. Only first editions with a 2025 copyright date will be accepted. Entries must be received by February 1, 2026. Submit four hard copies of each book or an electronic copy (must be an e-Book or a PDF manuscript in publisher’s page-proof format) along with the author’s mailing address, telephone number, and email address to:

David T. Z. Mindich, AEJMC History Book Award Chair
Temple University Journalism Department
2020 North 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122

If you have any questions, or to submit electronic copies, please email Book Award Chair David T. Z. Mindich at mindich@temple.edu.

Current recipients

2025 (two recipients) Gwyneth Mellinger’s Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) and Dr. Ying Qian’s Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Past recipients

2024 Ken J. Ward, Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition Between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News (University of Colorado Press, 2023).

2023 Andie Tucher, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia University Press, 2022)

2022 Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021)

2021 John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020)

2020 Will Slauter, Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford University Press, 2019)

2019 Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Harvard University Press, 2018)

2018 Fred Carroll, Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the 20th Century (University of Illinois Press, 2017)

2017 Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2016)

2016 Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

2015 Matthew Cecil, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014)

2014 Jinx Coleman Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Louisiana State University Press, 2013)

2013 Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)

2012 Peter Hartshorn, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint, 2011)

2011 Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Harvard University Press, 2010)

2010 Hugh Richard Slotten, Radio’s Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2009)

2009 Kathy Roberts Forde, Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008)

2008 Bruce Lenthall, Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

2007 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (University of Tennessee Press, 2006)

2006 Chad Raphael, Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television Documentary (University of Illinois Press, 2005)

2005 Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (University Press of Florida, 2004)

2004 No award

2003 Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (University of California Press, 2002)

2002 Jeffrey Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (University Press of Virginia, 2001)

2001 John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)

2000 Jeffery A. Smith, War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (Oxford University Press, 1999)

1999 Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1998)

1998 Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Photography (University of California Press, 1997)