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.
Q: What brought you to your area of scholarship?
A: I started my doctoral work at Texas thinking I would be a First Amendment scholar and work with Dwight Teeter, who was on the faculty at UT in the mid-1980s. But I was put off by the law review articles, which were so technical that I thought I should probably go to law school, but I really didn’t want to be a lawyer. So I gravitated to media history, which turned out to be a better fit for me. I began looking for dissertation topics in media history and kind of stumbled on the idea of Native Americans and the media, largely because I got interested in nineteenth-century journalism and the ways that the news changed in the 1800s—the rise of the penny press, the telegraph, the organization of the AP, the creation of illustrated press, sensationalism, and so on. That led me to think about news coverage of western expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the Indian wars, which turned out to be a rich area for research. I wrote my dissertation on nineteenth-century Indian news and later revised it into a book, The Newspaper Indian, which was published in 1999 by Illinois. I expanded that topic in another book, Indians Illustrated, which looked at images of Native Americans in the pictorial press. It was published in 2016, also by Illinois.
Q: Describe a key moment or turning point that defined your approach to historical research.
A: I guess my key moment would be reading Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News in a media history course at Texas. I had taken a journalism history course as an undergraduate, but I remember that as a “great man” class—James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, Adolph Ochs, and so on. I was pretty clueless about social history, so when I read Schudson’s social history of the news the scales fell from my eyes. I had been a small-town reporter and editor, and I had wrestled with practical questions about objectivity and truth, but I had never encountered historical explanations for how the newsmaking process developed in nineteenth-century America. So Schudson made a lot of sense to me, and I used his ideas to explain the ways the press depicted Indians in the nineteenth century. My other major influence was James Carey’s cultural approach to communication. Carey’s ideas helped me see how the news media tended to reproduce the values of the status quo and define what was newsworthy in ways that excluded Native Americans and their cultures.
Q: How does your research inform your teaching?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t really plan my research as part of my teaching, but there is a clear relationship. The easiest example in my case is a class I offer at Tulsa called Native Americans and the Popular Imagination, a topic that clearly overlaps with my research. In that class, I use my research to develop readings and assignments. In other cases, the relationship is less direct, but I do find myself drawing on research I’ve done as well as articles and books I’ve read for lectures ideas and for student projects. I’ve also written a fair number of book reviews and those books are sometimes helpful in the classroom.
Q: What advice do you have for junior faculty/scholars?
A: One piece of advice I heard as a young professor was to work toward a body of research and writing that adds up to something significant. That was helpful to me at the time because I had—and still have—interests in a wide range of topics, and I was in danger of spreading myself too thin. After that I tried to focus my research efforts more clearly on my primary research topic and not spend too much time and energy on side projects. So my advice to junior faculty is to stay focused and develop a research agenda that contributes to journalism and media history in a meaningful way. I was lucky to find a topic that I liked and that offered plenty of fertile ground for new research, so I stayed with it for many years.
