Newspaper Writers Research Articles

Analisis Kesalahan Penggunaan Sintaksis Pada Koran Elektronik: Sinar Indonesia Baru Edisi April 2024

The research carried out is useful for analyzing errors in the use of syntax found in the electronic newspaper studied, namely "Sinar Indonesia Baru" 2024 edition. Syntax is a science that discusses grammar by identifying errors in words, sentences, clauses and phrases. For the public, electronic newspapers are an important medium because they contain a lot of information. However, as wise citizens, we must also ensure the clarity or truth of the information contained in electronic newspapers. In this case, the method or method used is to collect data and analyze errors in the electronic newspapers studied. The results of this research are to discuss errors such as grammar, unclear sentences, and errors in the contents of the newspapers analyzed. Therefore, this research functions as a provider of new insights for newspaper writers in order to improve the quality of the writer's writing and the quality of the language, especially in the April 2024 edition of the electronic newspaper "Sinar Indonesia Baru".

Popular Planners: Newspaper Writers, Neighborhood Activists, and the Struggles against Housing Demolition in Lagos, Nigeria, 1951-1956

As Nigeria prepared for independence in the 1950s, British planners and Nigerian politicians sought to improve Nigeria’s international image by dismantling what they called the “slums” of Central Lagos. This article examines how a loose coalition of residents—including female traders, homeowners, and tenants—challenged the idea that Central Lagos was a slum and pushed for alternative planning proposals that would suit residents’ interests. I propose “popular planners” to describe the residents who drew on their lived experiences and knowledge of colonial planning laws to critique building demolition and demand the Development Board amend its slum clearance plan. Their competing visions, articulated in newspapers, during street demonstrations, and in petitions, demonstrate everyday people’s investment in transforming the city’s future during the end of colonial rule and their opposition to exclusionary planning processes that continue to shape urban policies in Nigeria.

Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico by Corinna Zeltsman

Reviewed by: Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico by Corinna Zeltsman Christopher Conway KEYWORDS Print Culture, Printing, Mexico, Mexican Newspapers, Authorship, Public Sphere, Broadsides corinna zeltsman. Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. U of California P, 2021, 327 pp. The increasing availability of digitized nineteenth-century Mexican journalism and print has encouraged a boom in keyword research that allows scholars to recover, collect, and curate collections of articles from that period. These keyword archives can be illuminating, but their promise is limited by how search engines shape the visuality and experience of access. For example, while digital platforms allow quick and satisfying keyword searches, broader page-by-page views can be unwieldy and awkward. Under these conditions, our ability to absorb the form, variety, and evolution of newspapers or broadsides becomes more difficult, as does our ability to explain their history and uniqueness. These challenges are a reminder of the importance of combining digital resources with traditional archives and of being more probing and ambitious in how we interact with primary sources of all kinds. In other words, the scholar, and not the digital platform, should be the research algorithm. Corinna Zeltsman's Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico is a fantastic example of what is possible when a scholar puts their sights beyond keywords toward the bigger story of the political, discursive, and symbolic meanings of print culture. Zeltsman sketches vivid portraits of the most important printers of the century as well as their disputes with state and religious authorities over freedom of speech. Unlike narrower, thematic studies, Ink under the Fingernails delivers a wide-ranging history and framework for studying Mexican print culture and nineteenth-century intellectual life writ large. The latter point is important because virtually all nineteenth-century Mexican writers were newspaper writers who frequently found themselves in print skirmishes. Zeltsman tells the story of the print ecosystem that published these writers and provides invaluable information about newspapers and their editors, the material and technological practices of printing, and changing definitions of authorship and editorship. The book elegantly stores its literature reviews and secondary sources in notes, producing a readable narrative that will appeal to scholars in different disciplines. Chapter 1, "The Politics of Loyalty," explores the political and bureaucratic hierarchies of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century state-s ponsored newspaper printing, particularly Manuel Antonio Valdés (1742–1814), the editor of the Gazeta de México. Official printed material required viceregal licensing and was assessed by representatives from the Mexican Inquisition and other Catholic dignitaries. This network of power and patronage defined print through negotiation with power brokers whose authority was, in turn, reinforced by the publication of censors' reports and official licenses. Zeltsman also underlines competing definitions of what an official newspaper should be and identifies the kinds of political, technical, and financial barriers that troubled the printing of the Gazeta de México. The cultural politics of printing during the Mexican War of Independence is at the center of chapter 2, "Negotiating Freedom." This chapter considers competing definitions of freedom of speech and how royalists and insurgents deployed print to argue their respective causes. Zeltsman tracks the uneven and inconsistent application of freedom of speech and how editors and authors like José Joaquín [End Page 110] Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827) tried to support and expand the role of print. She also examines the controversy surrounding Felipe Merino's broadside El liberal a los bajos escritores (1820), which attacked the timidity of writers and the reluctance of Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca (1754–1835) and other military officials in implementing parts of the Constitution of Cadiz. This cause célèbre, like other case studies contained in the book, is a kind of laboratory that allows Zeltsman to delineate actors, interests, trends, and shifts in political and cultural debates about print. Chapter 3, "Responsibility on Trial," explores two topics: the management and understanding of legal responsibility regarding print, and how one of the most notable printers of the century, Ignacio Cumplido (1811–1887), theorized the role of the printer in a republic. These two issues are linked because...

Illocutionary Speech Act Analysis in Nipashe Newspapers’ Headlines

The purpose of this study was to look at headline writers’ intentions from Tanzanian Nipashe newspapers and classify them in accordance with illocutionary speech acts Taxonomy by Searle (1979). The study employed a qualitative research approach and a descriptive research design. The study involved the population of 1095 front-page newspaper headlines. A sample of 130 headlines was chosen and each headline was classified according to the taxonomy of illocutionary Speech Act. Out of the five categories of speech acts developed by J.R. Searle (1979), which served as the theoretical foundation for the study, four speech acts were found to be executed in the sampled newspaper headlines, with the representative speech act type predominating. Claiming, urging, remembering, reporting, recommending, assuring, bragging, concluding and deducing were some of the assertives' or representatives' illocutionary acts that appeared in the headlines. Directive headlines surveyed were used by copy editors to request, order, command, question and suggest that readers of the newspapers do something. Some headlines included commissive speech acts, which copy editors used to commit themselves to future actions. The headlines with expressive illocutionary acts were used by the editors to thank, pardon, apologize, blame, deplore, congratulate, regret and praise. There was no declarative speech act performed in the Nipashe newspaper headlines. The study recommends that the newspaper writers continue executing assertive speech acts in their headlines if they wish to tell the truth, use commissive speech acts if they want to make commitments about future events, use directive speech acts if they want readers to do something, use expressive speech acts to draw the attention of their readers and express their emotions and feelings and use declarative speech acts if they want to change the world and the attitudes of their readers at large.

Supporting Human Dignity in a Collapsing Field: Gestalt Approach in the Social and Political Contexts

Supporting Human Dignity in a Collapsing Field: Gestalt Approach in the Social and Political Contexts

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Beşinci Kola Karşı Halkla İlişkiler: Nadi ve Sertel’in Beşinci Kola Dair Kaleme Aldıkları Köşe Yazılarının Kamuoyunu Bilgilendirme Ekseninde Analizi

The aim of this study is to evaluate the frameworks of the information presented to the public about the fifth column activities, which came to the fore at a time when the Second World War started and the concerns about its spread to Turkey increased, in terms of public relations. Based on the document analysis carried out for this purpose, the existence of Cumhuriyet newspaper writer Yunus Nadi’s and Tan newspaper writer M. Zekeriya Sertel’s columns in 1940 on the fifth column activities have been determined and these articles have been selected as purposeful samples. The information of the selected columns has been processed and analyzed by thematic coding in the qualitative data analysis program Maxqda. As a result of the analyzes made, it has been observed that the relevant writers presented contents that can be evaluated in the categories of 'describing the fifth column' and 'opposing the fifth column activities', to the public. In the explanation category of the fifth column, it has been determined that references were presented, descriptions were made and examples were shown; in the category of resistance, it was seen that the necessity to be vigilant by preserving national unity was emphasized, examples of attitudes and behavior patterns that people should apply against the fifth column were presented. The study differs from its counterparts in dealing with the handling of the issue by the gatekeepers in the Turkish press in the golden age of fifth column activities.

Newspapers and Dynamics of Religious Communication: The Test Case of Sufi News

Religion and the print media are two powerful motivators and sources of meaning, information and culture, and their relationship has been there seen since 19th century with the advent of industrial revolution. This research aims to analyze the portrayal of Sufism in the print media by investigating features of Sufi news stories of Urdu newspapers. For this purpose, this study applied qualitative approach to investigate news writings of national newspapers published from the city of saints, Multan. To provide a comprehensive overview, this study has analyzed news stories printed on the occasions of death anniversaries of prolific Sufi saints in four leading newspapers, Jang, Nawa-i-Waqt, Express and Khabrain, to contribute to the contemporary studies of religion and the print media. Probing the dynamics of religious communication, the study found the holy sketch of Sufi saints that portrayed them as great Muslim and spiritual mentors, and a heart of love and religious harmony. Their path and ideologies were recognized as the sources of inspiration for eternal success. The newspaper writings stated that Sufis are the treasures of the divine grace, wisdom and spiritual knowledge whose teachings address the love of God and Prophet Muhammad (SAW), the concept of piety, humbleness, pardon, the uncertainty of the world, and optimism. In this background, this research, with its results, is an important addition for a better understanding of the association of religion and media.

Becoming a State Language

This paper explores the development of Finnish into a standardized language of politics, science and culture in the nineteenth century. For contemporaries, this meant that Finnish could be regarded as a language that supported Finland as a state. We assumed that this expansion of the domains of use of written Finnish would have necessitated the development of more nuanced ways of expressing opinions and attitudes. We studied this by charting the overall frequency of modal expressions as well as the share of epistemic/evidential adverb types among modal adverbs. We found that the share of modal expressions increased in conjunction with the expansion of the Finnish-language press in the 1840s and again in the period after 1880. More importantly, we found that the amount of very frequently used epistemic/evidential adverb types increased in the mid-1800s, meaning that on average, Finnish newspaper writers had more means for nuanced expression in the latter half of the century.

Aristotelian Rhetoric and the Politics of Persuasion: A Study of Imran Khan's Venture into Politics

This paper explores the politics of persuasion with special reference to Imran Khan's venture into politics. Influenced and inspired by Aristotle, he effectively used various methods of persuasion, including ethos, pathos and logos, to convince the audience to come out in large numbers and support his cause. Imran Khan was in a better position to act effectively in accordance with the features annunciated by Aristotle. This strategy worked effectively because, during the sit-in, Khan was not only able to keep his audience actively engaged and involved, he also did not let their energies exhaust. This is evident from the fact that a number of participants never came down; instead, it kept going up for continuous 126 days. Moreover, Imran Khan broadened his vote bank to such an extent that he was able to form government in the center and other two provinces in the 2018 elections. Data was collected through secondary sources from books, research articles and newspaper writings. Findings suggest that Imran khan effectively used the strategy of persuasion to change the political opinion of the masses and won the elections in the end.

Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit Chelsea Foxwell (bio) Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan. By Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2019. xvi, 315 pages. $75.00. Aesthetic Life is an expansive study of the concept of feminine beauty and of the bijin (beauty or beautiful person) in Meiji literature. Arguing that Meiji [End Page 536] authors treated the concepts of beauty, Japan, art (in the broader sense of media, including literature), and women as interrelated problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit traces the bijin (a term that in the modern period applied almost exclusively to women) through literary works, journalistic essays, pictures, and ephemera such as postcards and photographs. Seven chapters underscore feminine beauty as a subject of central symbolic importance if not national obsession in literature and thought from the 1880s through the end of the Meiji period. The author begins by considering Meiji Japanese consciousness of mid- to late nineteenth-century Western fantasies about Japanese women. It shows how by 1889 Japanese writers began to define the bijin as "a woman perfect in spirit and appearance," a prognosis that assumed mastery of both "Western morality" and "old morality."1 From roughly this date onward, the works of critics, novelists, magazine and newspaper writers, department store and advertisement copy writers, and others reflected a flurry of activity to articulate the characteristics of the bijin. As Tomi Suzuki has written, "In the mid-1880s, both the 'reform of fiction' and the 'reform of women' began to be discussed seriously and widely."2 Aesthetic Life gathers a diverse range of literary and popular writing to show that these discourses were not merely occurring in parallel but were deeply intertwined. Magazines and advertisements marketed to women, massreproduced pictorial or photographic idols and advertisements directed toward men, and literary novels and short stories addressing both sexes show that the bijin, like the Western Orientalist construct of the "geisha girl" analyzed in chapters 1–2, was a leitmotif that stretched beyond discourses of femininity. The quest to define the bijin was part of the broader Meiji search for new ideals which sought to define or redefine almost every aspect of national customs, beliefs, and cultural forms. In seeking to understand why the bijin was so pervasive, the book points to the many literary and visual constructs, starting with those from the West, whereby idealized images of women also functioned as articulations of an ideal Japan, past, present, and future. The discourse on women and bijin in this sense transcended the sphere of gender. Even so, gender is nonetheless essential to understanding how women—in particular, women defined as visually enticing—were objectified to the extent that they could serve as stand-ins for the nation. In her first two chapters, Lippit emphasizes that nineteenth-century European and U.S. writers established the "geisha girl" in particular and "Japanese women" in general as literary and cultural figures that facilitated [End Page 537] the Western objectivization and trivialization of Japan as a feminized object of Orientalist male enjoyment. In doing so, these writers were engaging in an already established trope whereby Western Orientalist representations of the East simultaneously asserted fantasies of the West's dominance over the East together with "fantasies of men's limitless power to enjoy the bodies of women."3 It is well established that the hegemonic attitude of Europe and the United States toward Japan and Asia, which led in art to "interpretations of Japanese perception and expression as childlike," also invited the Western feminization of Japan as another means of expressing and emphasizing Euro-American dominance and masculinity.4 The rhetorical device of the work of art (such as a painting, photograph, or sculpture) concretized the arrangement by visualizing the literal objectivization of Japan and of Japanese women, doubling the image of masculine Western appropriation of the feminine Japan. In Aesthetic Life, we see Japanese authors inherit and at times speak back to the Western Orientalist discourse of a feminized Japan. However, we almost never hear how women readers and writers in Japan intersected with this discourse...

The Communicative Functions of Tanzanian Online Newspaper Headlines

This paper sought to analyse the communicative functions Tanzanian online newspaper headlines. A sample of Mwananchi and the Citizen dailies was obtained purposively from10 Tanzanian registered online newspapers. Also, the corpus of 259 front page headlines was randomly collected from the two digital papers. Using a checklist, the study collected and analysed data from the online newspaper headlines with SPSS version 20. The study revealed that 69.9 % of the two daily newspaper headlines observed the traditional communicative function of a newspaper headline that requires the headline to informative and summarise the articles it represents. However, a small fraction of newspaper headlines appeared to be less informative, ambiguous and vague, and metaphorically constructed in that readers could only understand their intentions either by clicking or reading the full articles or infer the meaning through contexts. The study concluded that the use of less informative headlines was the marketing strategy that the digital newspaper writers used to draw the attention of readers. The study recommended carrying out the study on how the newspaper headlines published impacted readership and visibility on the search engines and social platforms.

Fighting Hatred and Teaching Love in a ‘World that is Common to us all’: Recontextualizing Stefan Zweig’s Pedagogy of Humanism

Abstract In late 1933, Stefan Zweig stood before a committee to aid German Jews, and pleaded for immediate action to help German-Jewish children find new homes abroad. This article examines Zweig’s call to accept refugees within his larger quest to promote a humanist and universalist Europe. His goal was not merely intended to help individual Jewish children enjoy happier childhoods in other parts of the world, but a collective task to combat hatred. Stefan Zweig’s humanism and cosmopolitanism expressed themselves in a pedagogic and educational mission that was based on a particularly Jewish commitment to Bildung and took two major forms—a literary one (as seen in his historical-biographical writings) and an activist one (in his speeches, interviews and newspaper writings). The two expressions worked in tandem and reflected the same message and concerns. Moreover, both reflected his general aim to promote and help realise an alternative, humanist Europe; one in which the healthy and happy future of Jewish youth (and others) would be ensured.

Leer en el destierro. Escenas de lectura en los periódicos de fray Castañeda

En 1821, el cura porteño Francisco de Paula Castañeda fue desterrado de Buenos Aires a causa de la irreverencia de sus publicaciones periódicas. En el número 73 del Despertador Teofilantrópico Mí­stico-Polí­tico, que salió a la luz una vez que el fraile ya estaba de regreso en la ciudad, se publicó un extenso texto en el que Castañeda relata cómo fue su exilio. El artí­culo analiza las distintas escenas de lectura que componen esa narración y sus ví­nculos con otras representaciones de la práctica lectora aparecidas en publicaciones del autor. Se trata, en todos los casos, de figuraciones en las que la lectura se desenvuelve en contextos de carencias materiales y simbólicas y que deslindan un perfil de Castañeda no solo como redactor de periódicos, sino también como lector de libros.

Causes and Effects of Child Marriage in Bangladesh: A Case Study at Halishahar, Chattogram, Bangladesh

Child marriage is one of the social diseases in Bangladesh which is an obstacle to overall progress of the country. It is still remaining a strong social custom in Bangladesh which causes high population growth rate of the country. It is a social phenomenon in Bangladesh that might be defined in many ways such as a legal problem, social problem, health problem, population problem and gender discrimination problem. Child marriage is the violation of child rights and an apparatus of discrimination against women. A considerable portion of the population of the country is children and in order to convert them into productive human resources of the country the problem of child marriage has to be addressed properly and steps should be taken immediately. This paper attempts to highlight the socio-economic causes and consequences of child marriage in Bangladesh. This paper also suggests some procedure to eliminate child marriage in Bangladesh. This research is conducted on the basis of primary and secondary data. For primary data a survey is conducted from September, 2018 to December, 2018 among 150 women aged 25 to 45 who got married before 18 years and live in slum at Santibag Area, Halishahar, Chattogram, Bangladesh. Secondary data are collected from various journals, books, reports and news paper writings.

“Esas palabras eléctricas”: Arlt on the Telephone

The presence of the telephone throughout the work of Roberto Arlt calls for closer examination, for although this sound reproduction technology functions differently in the newspaper writings and novels that made him famous, it always allows this sophisticated media theorist to explore the expanding role of networks in everyday life in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Unlike the publics created and catered to by radio or newspapers, the telephone exhibits a unique combination of intimacy and immediacy that depends on a widely available network of wires extending across the city. After tracing some of the history of Argentine telephony and Arlt’s intersections with it, I review a series of aguafuertes in order to reveal how he understands the specificity of the medium as well as how he occasionally attempts to render this textual space a telephonic one. Turning to his novels, I then address his depictions of the telephone network as a key one among the many that, taken together, constituted a constantly changing city. As I argue, attending to the telephone—and its contrasts to the phonograph and radio—complements other scholarly work on Arlt’s engagements with visual media like cinema and photography. Often appearing alongside each other in his works, telephony sharpens print as an instrument of media theory as the latter, whether as novel or newspaper, retains the crucial ability and responsibility to situate the former.

A Corpus-based Appraisal of Doubts and Certitudes in Cameroon English Newspaper Writing: Attitudes and Prospects

A Corpus-based Appraisal of Doubts and Certitudes in Cameroon English Newspaper Writing: Attitudes and Prospects

Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the Syndicated Columnist

The syndicated political columnist emerged as a fixture of American newspapers in the 1930s. By the end of the decade, the partisan views of a few journalists were placed before millions of potential readers. Columnists offered readers an alternative to the event-based, source-driven reporting style of the day. They offered publishers an inexpensive source of politically sophisticated content that they could use to advance their ideological interests or to demonstrate fairmindedness on the opinion pages. Conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler was among the best known and most divisive newspaper writers of the day. He was a sharp critic of the Roosevelt administration, organized labor, and liberals, and his work as a regular contributor to daily newspapers was followed by supporters and detractors alike.

A Corpus-based Appraisal of Doubts and Certitudes in Cameroon English Newspaper Writing: Attitudes and Prospects

Newspapers constitute an important medium of informational dispersal, especially in postcolonial multilingual Cameroon. Its language has direct implications on Cameroonians’ interpretations and appreciations of events in their environments. Consequently, degree of truthfulness is extremely vital in news stories, in order to regulate facts, based on what is doubtful and what is certain, for purposes of civil order and serenity. In this paper, I investigated the effects of personal metadiscourse markers – hedges and boosters – in Cameroonian online newspaper writing and on readership. A corpus of 19 randomly selected inciting stories, from nine online leading newspapers in Cameroon, constituted the primary data. In addition, an interview was conducted for purposes of ascertaining authorship and readership. The corpus was then subjected to the 2014 AntConc 3.4.4.w. software to obtain the frequencies, concordances and functions of pre-identified hedges and boosters. The findings revealed that Cameroon English newspapers are more likely to boost claims than hedge them and that such claims have significant effects on the Anglophone Cameroonians’ interpretation and appreciation of events in the country. Keywords: Corpus-Based Study, Doubt and Certitude, Writing, Cameroon, Attitude and Prospects DOI : 10.7176/RHSS/9-14-02 Publication date :July 31 st 2019

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus

Letters from the People: A Response to Radiclani Clytus Benjamin Fagan (bio) It is a real pleasure to compose this letter in response to Radiclani Clytus’s invigorating and absolutely necessary “Visualizing Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop’” (Spring 2018). As Clytus notes, Wilson is not exactly unknown to scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, and especially not to those who focus on African American literature and culture. In 2015, for example, Leif Eckstrom and Britt Rusert edited a digital edition of Wilson’s 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery” for the Just Teach One: Early African American Print initiative. But while scholars may be aware of Wilson’s earlier correspondence to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, published under the pseudonym “Ethiop,” these missives have gone largely unexamined. That is, until Clytus’s essay. In addition to accomplishing the important work of introducing Wilson and his letters in particular to readers of this journal, Clytus situates these newspaper writings within a series of overlapping cultural constellations and in doing so makes a powerful argument for placing Wilson at the center of our explorations of nineteenth-century African American literature. Clytus devotes much of his article to exploring Wilson’s writings on the spectacle of New York City’s streets. From the 1830s to the 1850s, the promenades up and down Broadway in particular attracted the attention of a host of onlookers, with well-known white authors such as George Foster and Nathaniel Parker Willis offering detailed accounts of the display. Adopting the “urban flaneuring” of such figures, Wilson-as-Ethiop recognized the Broadway strolls as condensed performances of [End Page 17] the antebellum city’s overlapping racial and class anxieties (30). Relaying the scene in an 1852 letter to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Wilson detects in all the “white, ghost-like, motionless face[s],” be they rich or poor, “the same hawk-line nose, and thin, livid lip, and restless wolf-like countenance, indicative of keen scent after what is another’s” (36). By contrast, writes Wilson in the same letter, the scene on Church Street, “alias (black) Broadway,” is one defined by black joy: “Life, vivacity, merriment, mark the faces that now present themselves” (48). This juxtaposition of predatory whiteness to the “refined freedom” of black New Yorkers upends the visions of race and class peddled by writers like Foster, whose 1850 New York by Gas-Light consistently characterizes the city’s black inhabitants as, in Clytus’s crisp phrasing, “insistently proximate to Manhattan’s criminal underworld” (48; 36). Wilson thus emerges as a sophisticated theorist of the ways in which race and class are performed through urban spectacle. Accordingly, for those of us interested in issues of race, class, and the city in the nineteenth century, his missives to Frederick Douglass’ Paper become necessary reading. By reading the Ethiop missives together with a range of visual materials, Clytus also recovers Wilson as a keen reader of nineteenth-century visual culture. As Clytus argues in his essay’s opening, through his letters to the newspaper, “Wilson insisted on nothing less than the graphic reformation of African American subjectivity” (30). While not producing what we might traditionally recognize as visual material, through his manipulation of “the idea of figural vision in print,” Wilson created imaginative illustrations of black life in the city that ran counter to dominant visual representations of African Americans (31). Clytus reads the Ethiop letters together with a selection of images that include Edward Clay’s Life in Philadelphia and Life in New York series, Thomas Benecke’s Sleighing in New York, and illustrations that accompanied an 1848 plan to build an elevated railway along Broadway. Such images tended to either erase black New Yorkers from the city or, more frequently, traffic in racist stereotypes. Countering such misrepresentations, Wilson’s letters suggest a visual register where blackness not only escapes the distorted images of white artists but indeed “embod[ies] the ideal of representative democracy” (49). Scholars who have written on Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” have similarly focused on his attention to the visual, and Clytus’s attention to his newspaper correspondence cements Wilson’s status as a key critic of visual culture. In...