Mike Conway and Josh Bennett (Indiana University Media School) have been awarded a university Public Humanities Project grant to create the Indiana Broadcast History Archive. Conway and Bennett are working with broadcasters around the state to collect archives related to the history of Indiana radio and television history.
Maddie Liseblad will be starting as an assistant professor of journalism at Cal-State Long Beach this fall. Dr. Liseblad is the current research chair for the History Division and will be its vice chair beginning this fall.
Sheryl Kennedy Haydel has been chosen as the new Director of the School of Communication and Design at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Kennedy Haydel has been an assistant professor at the Manship School at Louisiana State University.
David E. Sumner (Ball State University emeritus) has been invited by Prof. Patrick Rössler at the University of Erfurt, Germany, to contribute a chapter on American magazines for The Magazine Press in the Twentieth Century: A Global History, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2022 by the German publisher Wallstein Verlag.
The book is the first comprehensive history of U.S. Spanish-language television. Drawing from ten years of archival research, original interviews, and exploration, it reveals the inside story behind the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo, how they fought enormous odds, and finally rose as giants of mass communication in the English-speaking United States. The book argues that scholars’ study and understanding only of English-language television has hidden a key dimension of U.S. mass media, that they are extensively and endemically internationalized. Much of the book traces the rise of Mexican broadcast pioneer Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who founded Univision as the U.S.’s fourth television network only a few years after the beginning of TV on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Chapters go on to recount events that demonstrate that, despite attracting virtually no attention or pursuit among U.S. media scholars, Mexico’s powerful Azcárraga dynasty fundamentally influenced and shaped the development of television in the U.S. The history further unfolds with exploration of numerous American figures who directed the emergences of Univision and Telemundo. Although unknown in media literature, here identified and delved for first time, they are among the U.S. mass media’s foremost pioneers. The account reiterates the endurance, innovation, and popularity of Spanish-language television, and that its story is essential to understanding not merely the Latinx but overall history of modern America.
2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
Spanish-language television always has been out there. Univision has been the No. 1 single source of media many times. I don’t think media scholars ever had heard of it. (Media scholarship is a not a domain that’s good at grasping mass communication beyond white, Anglo, English-language media.) My professional career in television began as a volunteer rookie producer of a weekly Spanish-language TV show on an English-language station. This was in the 1970s, when Spanish-language broadcasting was known only in a dozen cities and virtually all television was three English-language channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC. The Spanish experience was my “break” that got me inside TV first as a news reporter, eventually as an anchor and news director. Although I worked in English-language TV, I never stopped following the Spanish-language counterpart to which I owed my career. Later as a media historian, I think I was the only one who knew that Spanish-language television existed.
3. What archives or research materials did you use?
A pivotal part of the book (on a landmark court case in which the FCC eliminated Univision’s foreign owners) was drawn from research at the National Archives. However, as an internal study of the Univision and Telemundo corporations, key documents either were not kept or subject to proprietary restrictions. Through dealings with the companies and parties, I was able to accumulate (and cite from) materials I located in numerous private collections. Much travel was involved.
4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
I’m not sure it’s really relevant to the present. It’s a story of history. I tend to believe that journalism and mass communication if they exist at all are on their last legs. A hundred years from now, people will look back at a bygone period when something known as journalism that massed a lot of people and was influential existed. I tend to see Spanish-language television as a piece of what those in the future will look back upon toward helping them understand what once was America’s “mass media era.” 5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects
Spend time researching a marketable topic before you begin. Writing published history seems easy—until you have to write a treatment that sells the topic you’ve plunged into. If you want to publish a book but your topic doesn’t brim with selling points, you will be trapped when you have to approach publishers. In the case of Univision, I had at least 50 rejections, each time with the stock comment “The topic doesn’t fit our market,” code for “we can’t sell it.” If the goal is a book, ask yourself “What will attract an audience?” and “What will get people to pay for what I’ve written?” These are publishers’ first questions. Do the analysis before, not after, you commit.
I hope that your summers are off to a good start, and that we can all catch our collective breath a bit.
It almost goes without saying that summers still mean work for scholars, and even in a pandemic-recovery season, that includes catching up on much-needed research, service, reading, writing and even getting in some extra teaching. Our community continues to impress me in its resilience, resolve and grace with all these endeavors. Recently, I was on a road trip to see my mom in Seattle and got a chance to meet (safely!) with a few of our members. I’ll just say this: you rock.
A couple of quick reminders before I proceed: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to please renew your membership if you haven’t done so yet, and to please register for the conference. It is online, Aug. 4-7, with our awards gala the night of Aug 3, at 7 p.m.; our general membership meeting is at 8:45 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5. Registration remains just $69 for regular members and $39 for student members, before July 23.
Cayce, Maddie, myself and the rest of the leadership team are excited for what we have in store, but we are also aware that we’re all more than a little Zoomed out, and so I can promise a straightforward experience, with an emphasis on breaks and starting/stopping at reasonable hours, as far as possible.
As this is my penultimate column—past chair Erika Pribanic-Smith will have a *final* word from me in our wonderful conference guide, which she is again graciously producing for us and which will be available in July, ahead of the conference—I just wanted to say a brief word of thanks for all the hardworking volunteers who have reviewed, signed on as moderators and discussants, served on committees, helped with initiatives, wrote emails, posted to our social-media channels, answered my often-tiresome queries and generally selflessly gave of themselves. Thank you!
We have continued a number of important efforts from last year, despite the pandemic, including our mentorship program, our teaching competition, our inclusion of grad students, our web site’s revamp, our various new awards, our journal’s healthy relationship with Taylor & Francis, and, of course, our awesome podcast, among other projects and programs. My time as chair has focused on supporting you during the pandemic in as many concrete ways as possible, and I hope I have succeeded in that. I have again realized my (many!) limitations, but you continue to inspire me.
We’ll be honoring a number of you at the conference with specific shoutouts, but I wanted to specifically recognize both Maddie and Cayce, for all their help, in matters large and small, throughout the year. They’ll do wonderful work as your new vice chair and chair, respectively.
I am filled with optimism and gratitude that the division will be in truly capable hands next year and beyond, and I am increasingly confident that we will be able to return in person, as well, to Detroit.
Finally, I’m grateful for our immediate past chair Teri Finneman’s encouragement and advice—she has acted as liaison for our journal, but has also been a critical sounding board for me and your other division leaders—thank you!
Look for more conference-specific highlights from me in my final column in the conference guide, which we’ll post to social media and to our listserv, but see other updates on our site, https://mediahistorydivision.com/, and again on @AEJHistory Twitter and our Facebook page.
Please reach out to me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, if you need anything, or just want to say “hi” as I wrap up my time as your division head.
It has been my great honor to have been your chair. Keep up the great work—#mediahistorymatters.
This book is about the profound and enduring threat to American democracy that rose out of the Great War – the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state. That horrific conflict required the mobilization of entire nations, no less in the United States than in Europe. The government in Washington exercised unprecedented power to shape the views and attitudes of the citizens it was supposed to serve. Its agent for this was the Committee on Public Information, the first and only time the United States government had a ministry of propaganda. Nothing like it had existed before, and it would be dismantled at the end of the war. But the CPI endured as a “blueprint” for the Information State that exists today in peace time as well as during war.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
The story of the CPI is a sprawling one that had not been told fully. It deserved to be. The few histories of it that have been written passed over congressional inquiries into its practices, its failures in field propaganda, its heavy-handed promotion of White Russian disinformation, and its bizarre (there is no better word) end-of-war mission to Central Europe, to name a few episodes. Not well understood or documented was the CPI’s connection to intelligence agencies, its use of front organizations, or its imaginative and chaotic way of doing business. No connection had been made between political campaigning in Wilson’s election of 1916 and the birth of the CPI in 1917, a connection that shows how campaigns are test kitchens for presidents’ use of their propaganda powers after their secure the White House. No attention had been given to the constitutional irregularly of Wilson’s creation of the CPI by executive order, rather than with congressional authorization, a lapse that put it on uncertain footing from the beginning.
3.What archives or research materials did you use? The full story cannot be found in the CPI records in the National Archives. The archives of organizations with which the CPI interacted, the personal papers of individuals whom it touched, and the records of other countries that waged propaganda at the same time contain invaluable information on what the CPI did to shape views and provide context for reconstructing the conditions shaped it. Altogether I consulted more than 150 collections in the United States and Europe.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
Presidents enjoy enormous power to shape public opinion. In some cases this is a matter of bypassing he press. In some cases a matter of using the press. This book looks at both aspects. I was surprised, by the way, by the extent to which journalists were willing to be used, even if they resented the CPI. I would call this a major finding of the book. The dynamic that existed in the Great War exists today. The Trump administration’s excessive use of is propaganda power added to the relevance of the book, something I had not anticipated when I began to write it.
5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects
The same advice that every reporter gets from editors. Always make one more call, if you have time. I sought to turn over every rock – read that as sought to peer into every archive – that I could identify. That is why the book took so long to write.
I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely still in recovery mode, post-semester (though I am rooting for our friends still wrapping things up on the quarter system!).
I have been humbled by my limitations over the past year, but especially over the past month or so. Please know I deeply appreciate of you all and your resiliency and community.
I just wanted to check in to encourage you to please renew your membership and register for the conference, if you have not done so—our draft schedule is also out, thanks to the hard work of Maddie and Cayce. We will be following up closer the conference with more details. Thank you to all those who submitted, reviewed or have otherwise volunteered to help.
As a reminder, the conference is online, from Aug. 4-7—though don’t forget that our awards gala will be on the night of Aug 3, at 7 p.m. We’d love to see you at the general membership meeting at 8:45 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5. Registration is till only $69 for regular members and $39 for student members, as long as you sign up before July 23. I’m looking forward to a great conference, and hopefully to next year back in person in Detroit.
ICA’s Communication History division is a great sibling organization to join; they just had their conference (it’s happening right now as I write this note).
Our colleagues at the ECREA’s Communication History section are having a post-conference in September, with one focused on “Old Media Persistence;” you can read their call for papers here: https://oldnewspersistence.com/cps/.
Finally, the Media Building conference, focused on the physical manifestations of news, is happening in July, for free, and is sponsored by some of our media-history friends in the UK and around the world.
We’ll continue to update you via the listserv, @AEJHistory Twitter and the History Division Facebook page, as well as our new site: https://mediahistorydivision.com/; please know your leadership team is working hard behind the scenes, for you all.
Feel free to drop me a line at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, if you have any questions or just wanted to say “hi.” Take care—#mediahistorymatters.
Kevin Grieves (Whitworth University) is pleased to announce the publication of his new book, Cold War Journalism: Between Cold Reception and Common Ground (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The book explores journalism and journalists of the Cold War era as they were perceived as threats, but also attempts at forging transnational journalistic connections across the Iron Curtain. The book also illuminates efforts to find common journalistic ground within the East and West blocs. The research draws on a range of archival sources, including historical radio and television content.
Vincent DiGirolamo (Baruch College) has been awarded the 2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys(Oxford University Press, 2019). The prestigious prize honors the best first book written on the period 1865 to 1920 published in the previous two years. Crying the News, said the award jury, “sensitively brings to light the experiences, struggles, and influence of a massive group of child laborers who walked the streets of our cities and towns, often unseen if rarely unheard, for more than a century.”
Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has won the History Division’s annual Covert Award for her article, “The Voices of Public Opinion: Lingering Structures of Feeling about Women’s Suffrage in 1917 U.S. Newspaper Letters to the Editor.” Her article “offers insight into the production of letters to the editor as an act of strategic communication by suffragists and anti-suffragists, the regulation of letters to the editor by news gatekeepers and agenda-setters, and the consumption of letters to the editor by newspaper readers in 1917, a pivotal year in the decades-long cultural struggle over women’s suffrage.”
John Maxwell Hamilton (Louisiana State University) has won the History Division’s annual book award for Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda (LSU Press, 2020). The judges described the book, which examines the Creel Committee’s establishment of a propaganda system and the threat it posed to democracy, as “a magisterial work, comprehensive and highly readable.”
The steering committee of the twenty-ninth annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression solicits papers dealing with US mass media of the 19th century, the Civil War in fiction and history, freedom of expression in the 19th century, presidents and the 19th century press, images of race and gender, sensationalism and crime in 19th century newspapers, and the antebellum press and the causes of the Civil War. Selected papers will be presented during the conference Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, November 11–13, 2021. The top three papers and the top three student papers will be honored accordingly. The Symposium will be conducted via ZOOM (for both speakers and participants). If possible, it will also be conducted in person. The purpose of the November conference is to share current research and to develop a series of monographs.
This year the steering committee will pay special attention to papers and panel presentations on the Civil War and the press, presidents and the 19th century press, news reports of 19th century epidemics, and coverage of immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans. Since 2000, the Symposium has produced eight distinctly different books of readings: The Civil War and the Press (2000); Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (2007); Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism (2008); Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press (2009); Sensationalism: Murder, November 11–13, 2021, via ZOOM and in person The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga August 31, 2021.
Papers should be able to be presented within 20 minutes, at least 10–15 pages long. Please send your paper (including a 200–300 word abstract) as a Word attachment to west-chair-office@utc.edu by August 31, 2021.
For more information, please contact: Dr. David Sachsman George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs, Dept. 3003 The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (423) 645-5330, david-sachsman@utc.edu https://new.utc.edu/arts-and-sciences/communication/west-chair
Claire Rounkles, a doctoral student at the University of Missouri who completed her master’s work at The Ohio University, has won the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in Media History from the History Division for 2020.
Rounkles, who completed the thesis under the direction of Aimee Edmondson and Michael Sweeney, won for her work, “The Shame of the Buckeye State: Journalistic Complacency in Episodic Lynching in Ohio from 1872 to 1932.”
“I was wonderfully surprised, honored, and grateful of the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award committee selection,” Rounkles said. “And also thankful for the support and guidance of my amazing thesis committee, mentors, family, and friends who encouraged me to continue with this project.”
Rounkles’ work focuses on the journalistic narrative surrounding lynching’s in Ohio.
“This thesis introduced facts and statements made by journalists who had the platform to set the historical narrative—and set it badly,” Rounkles said. “It is pertinent to recognize history involving the coverage of lynching in America, especially the lack of acknowledgment of the humanity of those lynched. By studying this history, I hope to promote honest and challenging conversations in the journalistic community.
“This history has greatly affected how journalists report on minority communities. Until we address the history of using ‘objectivity’ to vilify and further disfranchise Black and Brown communities, the profession and practice of journalism will not change its ways.”
In evaluating the thesis, one judge said, “This thesis adds to literature of the history of the white press and its complicity in the reign of lynching terror in America. With a specific focus on Ohio, it highlights how racism and anti-Black sentiment/equal rights permeated white America, regardless of region.” Rounkles will receive the award, which also honors her advisors, at AEJMC’s annual convention in August. Her work has also been featured on the Journalism History podcast: https://journalism-history.org/2020/06/23/rounkles-podcast-court-held-at-midnight/
This is just a brief check-in note as we finish up spring semester (and soon, spring quarter, for those on that system!)—good luck to everyone. It’s been an exceptionally trying, tiring year, but the continuing vaccine news is helping make things brighter, and we’re looking forward to our summer conference. It is online, and will last from Aug. 4-7 (with our awards gala on the night before, on Aug. 3!).
If you haven’t had a chance to, check out the conference site and make sure to register: http://aejmc.org/events/virtual21/. Registration is very affordable this year, at $69 for regular members and $39 for student members, before July 23. If you haven’t renewed your membership, please do so soon—Cayce, Maddie and I are working hard to make sure the conference provides a great mix of scholarship and support for our community. The division’s annual business meeting will take place during the conference, as well—standby for more info on our programming this summer as we finish the paper competition and set the rest of our schedule.
Speaking of which, thank you to all those who have served on a committee, who have worked as a judge or reviewer, or have otherwise supported the division over this past academic year. We literally could not have done this work without you. As we finish the paper-selection process, I should spotlight once more the great work that Maddie Liseblad has done for us, with organizing that part of the conference in her role as research chair.
As I look to pass the baton to Cayce, and finishing my time as chair in August, I’ll be working on my remaining chair goals. Those include outreach to our international partners, including at ICA’s Communication History division. I’ll hope to see some of you at their conference later in May.
Please be thinking ahead to our sibling organization, the American Journalism Historians’ Association, and their call for papers, panels, and research-in-progress abstracts, due on June 15: https://ajha.wildapricot.org/2021_Paper_Call. Especially if you could not submit something to our conference, they are a really fine group of friends and colleagues, so please check them out.
Finally, a huge shout-out is due to Keith Greenwood, for his work on getting our new site up and running: http://mediahistorydivision.com/. We’ll be working on transferring more content over, and the old site should still work for a while, but the new one, as approved by the division last year, is much more secure (definitely something that’s been an issue lately with other nonprofit pages), easier to update and will allow for more continuity, between leadership teams.
Please keep an eye out for more award announcements on our @AEJHistory Twitter and History Division Facebook page, as well as to that revamped site.
#Mediahistorymatters and so does your work. Please check in with me at wmari1@lsu.edu, wtmari@gmail.com, or @willthewordguy, if you need anything or have any questions or suggestions.
Current research project: A book on the First Amendment and the right of publicity
Fun fact about yourself: As a kid, I lived in a requisitioned house in Berlin that had belonged to one of the generals executed for the plot to assassinate Hitler.
