John M. Coward, professor and former chair of the Department of Communication (now Media Studies) at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in his native East Tennessee before completing a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Coward’s primary research area is the representation of Native Americans in the nineteenth-century press. His research has been published in American Journalism, Journalism History, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Visual Communication Quarterly, and other journals. Coward has lectured on Native American images at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio, and other venues. His first book, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820-90, was published in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press. In 2005, Coward published an edited collection of news stories and editorials about the nineteenth-century Indian wars as part of the eight-volume Greenwood Library of American War Reporting. His most recent book, Indians Illustrated: The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press, was published by Illinois in 2016. We chatted by email about the impetus of his work, his most recent research project, and how his research informs his teaching.

Q. What is the most recent historical research project you have been (or are) working on?

A: My recent research has focused on Native American journalism, specifically the Red Power newspapers of the 1960s and ‘70s. I’ve presented conference papers in the last couple of years on an activist newspaper called The Warpath, published in San Francisco, and on Akwesasne Notes, a paper published in upstate New York. Both papers advocated for indigenous rights and attacked government bureaucracy, which made them interesting to me as a researcher. This area is a switch for me—I worked for many years on representations of Native Americans in the mainstream press in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But after two books on that topic, I needed a new research project, and I didn’t want to start in a completely new area. So the history of the Native press was appealing because it’s related to my earlier work and because it’s an understudied part of journalism history. A lot of people know about the Cherokee Phoenix, which was founded in 1828, but there have been hundreds and hundreds of Indian newspapers over the decades, and I wanted to find out what sort of Native journalism was being produced at various points in U.S. history. I was drawn to the Red Power newspapers because I wanted to see how the Native press covered the occupation of Alcatraz, the standoff at Wounded Knee, and other conflicts that marked the civil rights era.

Name: Meta G. Carstarphen, Ph.D., APR

Where you work: I am Gaylord Family Professor, Strategic Communication, in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma. 

Where did you get your Ph.D.: I earned my doctorate in Rhetoric (Dept. of English, Speech and Foreign Languages) from Texas Woman’s University (TWU) in Denton, Texas, which was founded in 1901. TWU is the oldest university primarily for women in the United States.

Current favorite class: Currently, I am excited by my new challenge of transforming my undergraduate and graduate sections of Race, Gender (Class) and the Media from large lecture classes to 100 percent online courses.  Since I first created these courses at OU in 2002, I have grounded them strongly in content about the historical development of the media and the evolution of identity portrayals. I really enjoy guiding students through what is often “new” information to them and encouraging them to apply this knowledge to contemporary media of all kinds.

The April 20, 1995, issue of the New York Daily News was dominated by coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. On page eighty-four, however, the newspaper unveiled a sports scoop. A few days earlier, an upstate New York newspaper, The Schenectady Daily Gazette, reported that the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders were “ready to make a fisherman in a boat their new logo” and change their colors to Atlantic blue with silver, bright orange, and navy blue trim. Schenectady was three hours from Long Island, so most Islanders fans had not seen the blurb. Besides, the Gazette did not publish a picture of the fisherman logo itself. Enter the Daily News, which branded itself “New York’s picture newspaper.” It had somehow obtained a copy of the logo and showed off its acquisition in a photo illustration spanning three columns. “Forget about Islander tradition,” the caption read. “Here’s what Denis Potvin would have looked like with the new ‘fish sticks’ logo on his sweater.” There was the Islanders’ Hall of Fame captain, his arms raised in celebration, with the fisherman logo superimposed over the original crest on his jersey. Two months before the Islanders planned to unveil the fisherman logo, it had been leaked to a tabloid with a penchant for sensationalism and puns.

April Ryan’s latest book, Under Fire, carries the subtitle: “reporting from the front lines of the Trump White House.” As Trump’s late 2018 insult spree directed against women journalists of color showed, this subtitle represents more than mere rhetoric.[1] Discharging venomous words as sharp as poison darts, Trump attacked CNN’s Abby Phillip for asking a question about Robert Mueller’s probe, saying: “What a stupid question… you ask a lot of stupid questions.” He accused PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor of asking “a racist question.” And he referred to Ryan, White House correspondent for Urban Radio Networks, as “a loser” who “doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”[2]

Ryan, Phillip, and Alcindor represented a triptych of Trump opprobrium that inspired syndicated political cartoonist Ed Hall to recall a piece of photojournalism history. That memory became the basis for Hall’s cartoon “The New Black Power,” which he gave the AEJMC History Division permission to reprint. In an email message, Hall explained: “I wanted to use an image that I knew would be immediately recognized, and something that spoke truth to power. So the classic photo from Life magazine photographer John Dominis was the first thing that popped into my head. The comparison: a sitting President, belittling and mocking three strong black women who were just trying to do their jobs, echoed across 50 years of racism and inequality. It seemed an obvious comparison.”[3]

By Erika Pribanic-Smith, History Division Chair, University of Texas-Arlington, epsmith@uta.edu

The History Division leadership team has been busy in the three months since the convention in Washington, D.C. Although you may have seen some of this news already, I thought it worth recapping to give the membership a sense of where we are and how much we have accomplished in this short time.

The national AEJMC organization looks for our activities to be divided into three categories: teaching, research, and PF&R (Professional Freedom & Responsibility). The latter encompasses the core areas of Free Expression, Ethics, Media Criticism and Accountability, Diversity and Inclusion, and Public Service.

When the division went through its five-year review in August, it became clear that the division has focused heavily on research in recent years. Teaching and PF&R activities had been limited to Clio columns and conference panels. Thus, generating more balance and synergy among the three areas became a goal for this year. We are well on our way to accomplishing this aim.

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A Narrative History of the American Press uses the tools of reporters and historians to re-create and interpret a compelling narrative of press, media, and communication history for today’s students. While providing a new understanding of personalities and events by closely examining primary sources, this book also looks at the development of American press with the insight of scholars who have studied it.

The individual chapters you will read in this book stem from lectures I have delivered for more than a decade in the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). As a media historian, I have headed dozens of semesters of classes for both undergraduate and graduate students that focus on the history of journalism. The people, events, developments, and concepts found in this book in most cases came straight from lecture materials and the written work of students, and they now compose a text for use by other instructors and students alike.

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(in alphabetical order)

Ross F. Collins (North Dakota State University, Fargo) has been elected president of the American Journalism Historians Association for 2018-19. His research specialties are World War I journalism history, U.S. frontier journalism history and French journalism history. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Donna L. Halper (Lesley University, Cambridge) won the 9th Annual Collectors Award from Historic New England for her work preserving memorabilia related to the history of broadcasting.

Janice Hume, Department Head and Carolyn McKenzie and Don E. Carter Chair at the University of Georgia, has grounded her research in public memory and how individuals are remembered through obituaries. Uncovering the stories of the past through the people who lived it has also provided numerous opportunities for her students and future historians to “play detective” and uncover stories untold. We talked over the phone on November 13, 2018, chronicling Hume’s path to discovering media history and how she has complemented her research and scholarship in the classroom 

How did you come to your area of scholarship?

I took a seminar in media history at the University of Missouri. It was almost an instant connection for me that this is what I wanted to study. The final paper out of this course would become my Master’s Thesis. I examined what qualities defined a heroic woman in the nineteenth century. My dissertation was a cultural studies of obituaries, comparing over 8,000 obituaries in the 1800s and 1900s. In the nineteenth century, I discovered that people were remembered for attributes of character. After the industrial revolution, however, obituaries showed that individuals were remembered for wealth or associations or for wealthy marriages.

What history-based courses have you taught and how does your research inform your teaching?

I currently teach a course in the history of American Mass Media. I have also taught historical methods. In my history of American Mass Media course, every year the class completes a project grounded in primary documents in materials. I ask them to find a primary inspiration document and build a paper around that document.

I also find opportunities to allow my students to connect journalism history with current events. WSB, the local ABC affiliate in Atlanta, recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, and my students were tasked to identify the top news stories of a particular decade. Many of their choices were actually selected by the station and were part of their hour-long retrospective!

What advice do you have for junior faculty?

There are lots of grad students interested in media history. It is most important to find topics that you are passionate about. It can take a long amount of time and not knowing what your primary sources are. It’s like a detective story.

Interviewed by Colin Kearney

Name: David Davies
Where you work: University of Southern Mississippi
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: University of Alabama, 1997
Current favorite class: Introduction to Social Media
Current research project: Anti-Communism Crusaders in Mississippi in the 1940s
Fun fact about yourself: I was a French major as an undergraduate and have enjoyed refreshing my knowledge of the language over the last few years. Who’s up for Paris?

Name: Flora Khoo
Where you work: School of Communication and the Arts, Regent University
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: Regent University (where she’s the current vice chair of BEA’s History Division).
Current favorite class: Theories and Effects of Mediated Terrorism
Current research project: Colin Kapernick Nike Ad: Strategic Use of Twitter in the Role of Public Debate of Sensitive Social Justice Issues
Fun fact about yourself: I love canoeing!

Name: Wendy Melillo
Where you work: School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.
Where you got your degrees: I am AU born and bred. I hold the following degrees:

• A. in International Relations and Print Journalism from American University
• A. in International Communication from American University
• A. in the History of Ideas from Johns Hopkins University

Thinking about getting a Ph.D in American History to improve my historical research methods. Anyone out there willing to discuss the wisdom or folly of earning a Ph.D post tenure?
Current favorite class: Ethics in Strategic Communication, which is a course I developed and teach online in our Master’s in Strategic Communication program. Students are taught how to use classical theories of ethics and professional codes of ethics to make justifiable decisions in response to thorny ethical scenarios. Since no course is ever complete without some history, we trace the rise of the Protestant work ethic and the role it played in the birth of modern capitalism. We also explore the roots of propaganda.
Current research project: I am juggling two book projects. One involves women in political communication. The second focuses on the chief lobbying organization for liquor manufacturers and the legacy of prohibition.
Fun fact about yourself: I hold a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. The training gave me great confidence when I covered night cops for the Washington Post.

Name: Andrew Stoner
Where you work: California State University, Sacramento
Where you got/are getting your Ph.D.: Colorado State University
Current favorite class: Writing Public Information
Current research project: I’m completing final edits on a new book, The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts, the first-ever biography on America’s AIDS chronicler. It will be released in 2019 by University of Illinois Press.  I’m also completing a manuscript examining the Presidential campaigns of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace between 1964-1976 in states outside of the Deep South.
Fun fact about yourself: I occasionally appear on true-crime TV programs such as “Snapped: Killer Couples” and “Crime Watch Daily” based on my writing about infamous crime cases across America. I also sold the rights to my book Cobra Killer for a 2016 feature film, “King Cobra.”

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

Just hours before the memorial service for Hazel Dicken-Garcia in June, I sat with four of her graduate students eating one of her favorite treats: a chocolate croissant from St. Paul’s Bread and Chocolate. As the sugar revved my body, I also felt a different rush. It was as if Dicken-Garcia—Hazel to all of us—was with us during a moment that would make her proud. Somewhat effortlessly, our conversation moved to scholarship. Soon we each jumped into a conversation to argue separately the merits and rigor of qualitative research and encourage one of my former classmates with her current research project. Sitting there with the warm sun on all of us, I could see Dicken-Garcia’s handiwork. It was not just our clarity about methodology that struck me. It was also the bond that stretched across geography and time and held us fast.

I’d come back to my home state of Minnesota for the service, a lunch with graduate school friends, and, as it turned out, a chocolate croissant. Dicken-Garcia changed my life in three important ways. She showed me how to be both fallible and excellent in teaching. She fed my insatiable appetite for questions that could be answered and honed with clarity and rigor. She taught me how to integrate family and career.

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