Elisabeth is an assistant professor of journalism at St. John’s University in New York. Her research focuses on the history of propaganda, international journalism, media-public affairs, and press-military tensions in the twentieth century.
1. What is the primary focus or central question(s) of your history research?
My research broadly explores the history of international journalism, government propaganda, military-media relations, and freedom of speech during wartime. I research reporters’ interactions with propagandists during past conflicts and, collectively, my scholarship argues how important it is to: 1) have journalists as eyewitnesses and foreign news as sources of information during conflicts, and 2) for scholars to dig deep and reveal how governments continue to build proficiency in propaganda and censorship that restrict reporters’ access to all sides of the story.
2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I am interested in the truth-dimension of information during war. I research reporters’ interactions with propagandists during past conflicts but also how governments build and expand propaganda operations to control narratives or public opinion during times of democratic crises. I was very lucky that Dr. Jack Hamilton, an extraordinary media historian and journalist, became my mentor and dissertation advisor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, where I completed my Ph.D. in Media and Public Affairs (2018). When I started my program, Jack was already working on his book, Manipulating the Masses (LSU Press, 2020), an extensive history of U.S. World War I propaganda, and I was immediately fascinated by that subject. I decided to write my dissertation on World War I German propaganda and worked in several archives in the U.S. and in Germany to gather records. Part of that work was later published in Journalism & Communication Monographs (2021) as the article, “Fighting an Armed Doctrine: The Struggle to Modernize German Propaganda During World War I (1914–1918).” I was awarded the 2022 Covert Award for this research.
While I was at LSU, I was also lucky to work with—and learn from—Dr. Erin Coyle, who truly is a model historian and scholar-educator. Erin and I have worked on several projects on the agenda-building power of publicity, and free press advocacy in the U.S. and abroad in the 20th century. Other members of the LSU Manship faculty, including Dr. Louis Day and Dr. Jinx Broussard, and Dr. Susan Marchand of the LSU History Department, were passionate in their teaching about historical methodology, cultural and intellectual history, triangulating primary sources, and how to investigate topics that respond to enduring themes in history, such as information warfare and freedom of speech.
3. What archives or research materials did you use? Please share strategies or tips and tricks.
My research usually takes place in military, diplomatic, and political archives or in libraries that have large collections of news, propaganda, and publicity records. Typically, I analyze (and often translate) news content and editorial files, telegrams, censored news or other censorship records, and propaganda materials like posters, speeches, staged photographs, flyers, films, and newspapers, maps, organizational charts, shipping labels, among others. In a recent article, “‘Real News Arrives From Abroad’: Transnational Eyewitnessing in Leonora Raines’ War Correspondence for the New York Evening Sun (1914–1918),” that I published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2024), I backtracked the story and transnational reporting of Leonora Raines, a little-known American female reporter (originally a fashion and music journalist) who covered the Great War from Paris. I used materials from military and diplomatic archives in Berlin and military archives in Freiburg. The U.S. Ambassador to Imperial Germany, James W. Gerard, sent a letter to the German Foreign Office in spring 1915, announcing Raines’ arrival. I then found Raines’ original scrapbook at the Atlanta History Center, in her hometown, and accessed her collected war news for the New York Evening Sun through the U.S. Library of Congress. I argue that Raines’ reporting shows how foreign news was an important source of information in the propaganda vacuum of World War I. Readers in the U.S. but also in Western Europe read her accounts, as foreign newspapers were widely distributed and, surprisingly, uncensored.
In a related project, I use primary sources from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives and Library for my ongoing research on propaganda-press history during World War I and II. I am currently working with the collections on propaganda posters 1914-1945, the Paris Peace Conference delegation propaganda, American fascist and Nazi groups in the interwar period, and World War II propaganda and psychological warfare in the European Theatre.
4. What’s your organizational strategy when working on a project? Any advice or recommendations?
I try to do as much background research about a topic as I can before I work in the archives so that I have a rough overview of what topics, key words, and what names to look for in the files. As traveling to archives can be very expensive and the logistics of getting there can often take longer than expected, I try to be as efficient as I can in the lead-up to my research, when taking pictures of materials on-site, and when analyzing the primary sources once I’m back home.
One recommendation is to create a chronology of the files or events that seem relevant and then filling in the gaps in between. Another recommendation is to contact the archivists and librarians way ahead of time and talk to them about your research, what you are looking for, and what related topics you are interested in since you might have extra time available at a particular archive.
5. How does your research relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
Throughout history, we see that propaganda and censorship during war impact how much and what news journalists can report, and which pictures the public is allowed to see. But that is only one part of the story, as propaganda societies, even in authoritarian regimes, are rarely entirely closed-off. As the history of journalism in war shows, reporters continue to find ways to source and access news to write stories, including those that detail governments’ obsession to manipulate images, narratives, and restrict press freedom. Propaganda messages and news about war also cross borders, often intentionally, other times secretly. Audiences, as historians have shown, turn to journalism to learn “real” news about conflicts and those involved in home- and war fronts, especially as propaganda can create an information vacuum. In my essay, “The Global Panoply of Propaganda-Press Cultures: Expanding International Journalism History,” which was published in American Journalism (2023), I look at the prospect of internationalizing the history of propaganda-press cultures even further. Similarly, in this historiographical piece, “Propaganda and Military Records as Sources for Journalism History,” which appeared in Historiography in Mass Communication (2023), I discuss how there is much meta-discourse between propagandists and journalists, especially as both sides emphasize the “truth-value” of their messages. For example, in an ongoing research project I look at international journalists’ discourse about government propaganda and publicity campaigns at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920). This period was marked by anxieties about the role of words and images used to ‘sell’ diplomacy and peace after belligerent countries had relied heavily on propaganda during the Great War.
6. What advice do you have for other historians working on projects related to your topic?
In writing international propaganda-press history, or history that involves international perspectives, I think it’s really critical to access primary sources and underutilized materials but also to center on diverse voices or underrepresented groups like minority reporters, female and/ or working-class journalists.
The concept of ‘doing’ propaganda research becomes less illusive and more tangible as soon as one starts to select, analyze, and interpret primary sources to make specific arguments about the cases, institutions, techniques, or individuals involved in creating and disseminating messages during a specific time.
It also helps to re-center our focus away from the ‘sender’ of a message (often governments, parties, or interest groups) to the ‘targeted’ audiences, and how, for example, the victims of hate campaigns use mass media to engage in counter-propaganda that seek to dispute the claims made against them. For instance, I just finished co-writing a history of German-Jewish World War I soldiers who used their own veterans magazine to create a fact-based counter-publicity campaign in response to the widespread stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende) used by Nazis against Jews in the 1920s and during Hitler’s regime.
7. What would be your six-word pitch about your research if you met a book editor or grant funder in an elevator?
Diversifying propaganda-press history is critical
Interested in being profiled in a future issue of Clio? Contact Lisa Lenoir at ldlenoir@iu.edu.