Matthew is a professor emeritus in the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on social and cultural history, and his most recent book is The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine (University of Illinois Press, 2024).

1. What is the primary focus or central question(s) of your history research?

My new book The Krebiozen Hoax focuses on an alleged cancer treatment of the 1950s and 1960s that was rejected by doctors and medical agencies but embraced by many cancer patients and people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. The book explores how people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being. 

Ford is a distinguished professor in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Ashley is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Saint Louis University. The two recently published the book How America Gets the News: A History of US Journalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

1. What is the primary focus or central question (s) of your history research? Explain. 

While our individual research is focused on two separate subjects—Ford examines Civil War era journalism and Ashley researches women’s media history—we are both broadly concerned with questions surrounding media production and media consumption.  

Our coauthored book, How America Get the News: A History of U.S. Journalism, is a concise history of American journalism—including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and digital—and introduces readers to the news media from the first colonial newspapers to today’s news conglomerates and the rise of the digital media. 

Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis (Potomac Books, 2022)

Describe the focus of your book. 

Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis examines the history of the shifting relationship between presidents and journalists from the founding of the United States until Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The book explores the forces – technological, economic, political, and social – and the personalities that have led to the often-tumultuous current relationship between the news media and the White House. Clash focuses specifically on times of crisis during the presidencies of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. They are the ones who I think shed the most light on how we arrived at this point of heightened tension.  

How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you? 

Since a young age, I have been interested in how reporters covered the presidency. My first book, Watergate’s Legacy: The Investigative Impulse, focused heavily on the Nixon administration and the fate of investigative journalism afterward. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I wanted to understand the historical dynamics that shaped his interactions with reporters. People frequently said his relationship with the news media was unprecedented; and, in some ways, it was, but I also wanted to analyze the ways that precedents had been established during other administrations.  

Henrik Ornebring (Karlstad University) and co-author Michael Karlsson won the James A. Tankard Jr. Book Award for Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (University of Missouri Press). The book is a history of the notion of journalistic “independence” and its meaning. Two History Division members were finalists for the award: Kathryn McGarr (Wisconsin) for City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press), and Jon Marshall (Northwestern) for Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis (University of Nebraska Press).

The James A. Tankard award recognizes the most outstanding book in the field of journalism and communication. It also honors authors whose work embodies excellence in research, writing and creativity.

Erin K. Coyle and Carolyn Kitch (Temple University) were selected for 2023-2024 Center for Humanities at Temple University faculty fellowships. The fellowships provide provide teaching relief and research support for tenured and tenure-track faculty pursuing research in the humanities or humanistic social sciences.

Social Justice, Activism and Diversity in U.S. Media History (Routledge, 2023)

Describe the focus of your book.

Finneman: The goal was to create a book of fascinating journalism history short stories that would appeal to Generation Z and also to general readers while still having a solid grounding in historical research. We wanted to go beyond “Great Man” history and tell the stories of a diverse range of individuals, events, and mass communication strategies with a diverse group of authors. We very much aimed to follow the theme of the Journalism History podcast to “rip out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.” I’ve taught both diversity and journalism history classes, and this book really merges those two fields.

Pribanic-Smith: Beyond diversity and inclusion, we have strived to include chapters that focus on social justice and activism. That includes how movements have harnessed existing media to advocate for social justice as well as how activists have created their own media to recruit members, inform and educate, build and maintain collective identity, engage and counter mainstream media, and mobilize collective action. We’ve also demonstrated how mainstream media have harmed marginalized groups by ignoring them or advancing damaging stereotypes.

Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)

Describe the focus of your book. 

When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA all-star team from Charleston, South Carolina, registered for a Little League Baseball tournament in July 1955, it put the Black team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry, and the Southern way of life. This was a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. White Southerners saw the young Black ballplayers as a threat to their way of life. White teams refused to take the field against the Cannon Street team. The Cannon Street all-stars advanced by forfeit to the state tournament and then to the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia. If the team won there, it would play in the Little League Baseball World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Little League officials, however, ruled the team ineligible because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field. This denied the boys their dream of playing in the World Series. Stolen Dreams chronicles how bigotry scarred the souls of these boys, who spent the next few decades suppressing their story and the decades after that telling everyone they could why it matters. This book tells their story and the story of racism in Charleston from the first slave ship to the present.  

O.N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble & Resilience in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)

Describe the focus of your book. 

Photographer O. N. Pruitt (1891–1967) for forty years was the de facto documentarian of Lowndes County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Columbus—known to locals as “Possum Town.” His work recalls many Farm Security Administration photographers, but Pruitt was not an outsider; he was a community member with intimate knowledge of the town.

He photographed fellow white citizens and Black ones, too, in circumstances ranging from the mundane to the horrific: family picnics, parades, river baptisms, carnivals, fires, funerals, two of Mississippi’s last public and legal executions by hanging, and a lynching. From formal portraits to candid images, Pruitt’s documentary of a specific yet representative southern town offers viewers an invitation to meditate on the interrelations of photography, community, race, culture, and historical memory. The book is a companion to an NEH-traveling exhibition.