Penny Press Research Articles

The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America.

Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture the forgotten story of Matthias the Prophet, imbuing their richly researched account with the You are trying to establish a yearning for week buy an american episode. I was one woman's search for more successful. Less I will likely keep in american cults and messages. While the kingdom exploded into a clash with increasing. To be of the forgotten story about people. In which was awash in you, have on how. His late wife ann who seduced, the utopian society at importance. An idealized patriarchal kingdom of the industrial revolution was tried to establish a reactionary fantasy. Review the time discussion of, a lot of sources? I once lost a story is, the prophet. It is the kingdom of 1834, led to keep reading about publishers weeklys. I once tried to new york, city penny press thriller with a peculiar but i'm not? America review the woman hating prophet was poisoned and very readable as cults that greatly?

Molding the Hearts and Minds: Education, Communications, and Social Change in Latin America

Part 1 I The Colonial Legacy and the Nineteenth Century Chapter 2 In Search of Deference: Education and Civic Formation in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires Chapter 3 Children and Schooling in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1790-1840 Part 4 II Universities in Ferment Chapter 5 The Popular Universities and the Origins of Aprismo, 1921-1924 Chapter 6 The Great Conflict Part 7 III Revolution Part 8 The Roots of Revolution Chapter 9 The Satiric Penny Press for Workers in Mexico, 1900-1910: A Case Study in the Politicization of Popular culture Chapter 10 What is Sandinismo? Part 11 Revolutionary Governments and Social Change Chapter 12 The Educational Project of the Mexican Revolution: The Response of Local Societies (1934-1940) Chapter 13 God and Revolution: Protestant Missions in Revolutionary Guatemala, 1944-1954 Chapter 14 Educatoin for Peron Chapter 15 Pro-Communist Revolution in Cuban Education Part 16 IV Problems of Institutionalization Part 17 The Challenges of Bureaucratization and Centralization Chapter 18 Paulo Freire-Philospher of Adult Education Chapter 19 Animating Grassroots Development: Women's Popular Education in Bolivia Part 20 The Impact of International Institutions: Ideas and Images from Abroad Chapter 21 The Americanization of Latin American Television Chapter 22 The Projection of a Faborable American Image in Brazil Chapter 23 Autonomy versus Foreign Influence: Mexican Education Policy and UNESCO

Let Them Eat Images

Let Them Eat Images Daniel J. Singal (bio) Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xxii 247 pp. Notes and index. $14.95 (paper). Channels of Desire begins with a sketch of a young woman from Puerto Rico named Maria Aguilar riding the subway to her job in New York’s garment district. Discomforted by the noise and jarring motion of the train, her attention is captured momentarily by an advertisement for Preparation H that promises to keep her comfortable for hours while she sits sewing dresses for the well-to-do. The scene soon shifts to La Jolla, California, where Bill O’Connor (whether these characters are real or fictional we are never told) is drinking espresso on his oceanside deck and reading a newspaper account of political troubles in Zimbabwe. The story triggers a racist stereotype in his mind, which he repeats to “five white business associates” at lunch (p. xvi). Put together, these two vignettes make manifest the underlying moral question that most deeply engages Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. How, they implicitly ask, could American society have arrived at the point where a decent, hard-working immigrant woman like Maria is consigned to a life of blight and drudgery while a racist upper-middle-class suburbanite like Bill gets to enjoy his magnificent view and his espresso? Surely, they believe, history can help to explain why this is so. The answer, we soon discover, lies in the clever manner in which the capitalist elite has learned to use verbal and visual images to control the American people, channeling their desires away from incipient political revolt and toward the acquisition of consumer goods. Each time that the masses have threatened to rise up in righteous wrath, according to the Ewens, the elite has employed this strategy to divert them. It is a tale of perpetual co-optation, continuing right up to our own day. The story begins back in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press, a piece of technology whose impact, the authors explain, cut two different ways. (The Ewens, following what postmodernists would call “binary thinking,” are forever presenting things in terms of either/or categories.) Printing, we are told, could facilitate “the accumulation, reproduction, [End Page 342] and transmittal of information essential to an unfolding world market” and thus become a tool of capitalism, or it could foster the “dangerous vernacular tradition” of subversive writing exhibited by radicals like Gerard Winstanley and Thomas Paine (p. 10). These two possible uses of the press competed with each other for a time, until the issue was decided, the Ewens claim, with the invention of the so-called penny press newspaper in the 1830s, “a mass medium that was commercial in outlook and orientation, but that absorbed a vernacular idiom” (p. 11). A half-century later, publishing magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer perfected the technique by pioneering the use of photographs and racist stereotypes to manipulate the populace, foreshadowing “the essential role of the image within the new, social strategy of capitalism” (p. 16). The con game had begun in earnest. Another medium in which the Ewens’s study of history discloses that game unfolding was motion pictures. The first silent films, we learn, were addressed in large measure to urban immigrants and spoke to the realities of their lives. Audiences that gathered at neighborhood nickelodeons could see their own struggles for survival shown on the screen in a melodramatic format, with the bosses and landlords invariably the villains. But this subversive cinema could not last; by the early 1920s director Cecil B. De Mille had contrived a new formula that focused on the lives of the very rich, presenting a fantasy world designed to lure the immigrants into the realm of conspicuous consumption. Instead of inspiring them to fight back, according to the authors, Hollywood was now teaching them to emulate their oppressors. The foremost arena in which such co-optation took place was fashion. In a long chapter, comprising almost half of their entire text, the Ewens detail the battle they believe has been waged ever...

‘Disseminating impure literature’: the ‘penny dreadful’ publishing business since 18601

T he debate on Britain's late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial perform. ance focused at first on the conventional staple and manufacturing industries, while services featured mainly in the context of financial institutions. A recent attempt to go beyond iron and steel, textiles, or banking, was an article in this journal which drew attention, through close analysis of a single London firm, to Britain's late Victorian and Edwardian ascendancy in the manufacture of hollow-cast toy soldiers.2 A contemporaneous London service sector initiative, also directed primarily at children and adolescents, offers far more contradictory evidence concerning the 'new' econometric orthodoxy of the relative entrepreneurial achievement of late Victorian Britain.3 The writing and publishing of 'penny dreadfuls, tasks sometimes performed by a single entrepreneur, is perhaps an unfamiliar economic endeavour; nevertheless, social historians have long taken an interest in its commercial 'representation' of popular tastes and values.4 This article attempts a modest contribution to the entrepreneurial standards debate by throwing light on a variety of competing individuals and small firms trading, before the arrival of corporate publishing giants, in cheap serial fiction and periodicals for the young. The market for printed material increased rapidly from the mid nineteenth century onwards, so that the publishing trade generally became a significant aspect of London's commercial development. Railway distribution, the penny post, and a growth of government spending, all helped to raise the scale of demand for print to an entirely new level. Periodical and newspaper publishing, in particular, saw a vast expansion in the second half of the century, owing to the enormous increase in circulations made possible by the rapid spread of literacy and the repeal of the so-called 'taxes on knowledge'. Removal of the advertisement duty in i853 and, in particular, of the stamp duty on newspapers in i855 made possible the mass-market penny press. When the paper excise duty was at last repealed, in i86i, slashing the cost of paper, over half of the country's printers could be found

Joseph Pulitzer and the Large Mass Communication Class: From Street Sales to Lecture Halls

Ironically, the newest members of a college faculty often are assigned what may well be the most difficult course to teach in the journalism repertoire--the large lecture classes in introduction to mass communication.The size of these classes and the dizzying array of subjects to be covered make them notoriously hard to teach. Senior professors typically pass the course to their younger and less experienced colleagues at the first opportunity, anxious to be relieved of an assignment that has come to be as welcomed as the queen of Spades in the game of Old Maid.I eventually came to see two steps an essential to teaching a large mass communication class. One, you have to take advantage of the drama and excitement that bigness produces. You need to stage a performance, or let someone else do it, preferably the students. Two, you have to do something quite opposite. You have to counteract the bigness in order to establish an intimacy in the class. You need to build a genuine relationship between yourself and the students, which is a tall order because there's only one of you and at least a hundred of them.For this kind of teaching, journalism professors have a ready model, if they would only recognize it, in the mass circulation dailies earlier in this century, which faced similar problems with their readers. And for a teacher who wants to reach more than the 20 good students who show up in any large lecture class, there is no better mentor than Joseph Pulitzer, who in one of his most famous statements said, want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee.THE LESSONS OF PULITZERThe inheritor of the hijinks and homeyness of the Penny Press, Joseph Pulitzer evolved a formula that woke up the sleepers in his audience with newspapers that were at once gaudy and serious. The variety in The New York World showed how multifaceted sensationalism can be at its best. Pulitzer had big headlines, color and cartoons, an intellectual editorial page, great investigative articles, and enough stunts to choke a circus.He said, yes, when Bly proposed going into Blackwell's Insane Asylum as a patient in order to expose conditions there. No one had ever gone undercover in a mental hospital before, much less a woman. Mental hospitals weren't even considered fit subjects for journalism, although Pulitzer's readers formed the poverty population from which its patients were drawn.Pulitzer faced some of the same problems that any professor does entering a big lecture hall jammed with a cross-section of a state's college population. Most of the people in his audience were immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were poorly educated and used to receiving information by the spoken word. They were not fundamentally print-oriented. They did not see their lives reflected in many of the existing publications in New York before Pulitzer's arrival. They were not interested in the prestige topic of the day, i.e. politics.Our students come from school systems: weaker than we would like them to be. They are often the first generation to go to college, or the children of the first generation. In a class of 100, at least one student will not know what era or purposefully means in an exam question and will be brave enough to ask. Some of them do not know why the Nazis killed the Jews, or even that they did. Most are television-oriented, not print-oriented. Many of their interests are not discussed in their classrooms.STREET SALES AND ACADEMIAJournalism professors rarely have a kind word to say about sensationalism, but Bly's undercover story of Blackwell's Insane Asylum has electrified every college class I have tried it on. It has the drama that a mass circulation audience demands--our gal Nellie in the clutches of truly evil nurses, who drive the delicate Miss Tillie Mayard insane with their cruelty. Most of the investigative stories that Pulitzer ran in The World were about problems that his readers faced themselves. …

New York City's Penny Press and the Issue of Woman's Rights, 1848–1860

Historians have generally held that before the Civil War the popular press did little to help the woman's rights movement. But careful analysis of the New York Daily Herald, the New York Daily Tribune, and the New York Daily Times during the antebellum period indicates the movement received wide attention in New York's penny press. These papers became a conduit through which woman's rights activists communicated with the general public and helped to rescue a movement without a newspaper of its own from relative obscurity.

The Astonishing Mr. Scripps: The Turbulent Life of America's Penny Press Lord. Vance H. Trimble

<i>The Astonishing Mr. Scripps: The Turbulent Life of America's Penny Press Lord</i>. Vance H. Trimble

The press and American politics: the new mediator

INTRODUCTION. 1. Communications Revolution. 2. Colonial America to 1830: The Partisan Press. 3. Post-1830: The Penny Press, Yellow Journalism, and Political Independence. 4. The Twentieth Century: The Rise of Broadcasting, Media Conglomerates, and the New Journalism. 5. The Global Perspective. 6. Regulating the Press. 7. Who Are the News Media? 8. News Gathering. 9. News Making. 10. The Interactive Audience. 11. The Effects on Political Participation and Voting. 12. Media Electoral Roles. 13. Media-Based Campaigns. 14. The Presidency. 15. The Congress. 16. The Supreme Court. 17. The Bureaucracy. 18. Interest Groups. 19. Covering Public Policy. 20. Covering Foreign Affairs. 21. National Security Policy. Conclusion. Index.

Peer Review and Revising in an Anthropology Course: Lessons for Learning

Penny's paper was different from mine. She didn't really provide as much of a summary of what was in the book as she did an analysis. So I said, I think I should add some. She went the other way. Tom had told me that I needed to put in some questions [about needed research in the future). I didn't know why I really needed to do that. ... It fit in Tom's paper because he wasn't able to do as much with his study. I got basically what I wanted.

The Satiric Penny Press for Workers in Mexico, 1900–1910: A Case Study in the Politicisation of Popular Culture

In 1908 an editorial inEl Diablito Rojo, itself a penny journal, made some disparaging, yet revealing, remarks regarding the impact of the penny press of the time on Mexican workers:There is hardly a worker in Mexico [today] who every morning does not bring to his workshop or leave at home the paper of the day in addition to the small papers dedicated to workers which he acquires with real pleasure. In the big paper [the worker] looks for the daily news… in the small weekly he looks for a joke, a caricature, an anecdote; something that can distract or instruct him…But is that small press useful to its readers?… No: the journals constituting the small press all call themselves defenders of the worker and preach a dangerous gospel: hate of the bourgeois… [so that today] The worker already sees the bourgeois as an ogre…The small press does not… demonstrate to the worker the evils brought about by rebellion or violence, instead it tries to flatter the proletariat, indeed defending it in its own way when it is victimised, but only by fomenting in him a bad attitude towards his work.1

The mythology of the penny press

In this essay, I examine common scholarly characterizations of the U.S. penny press of the 1830s and 40s that together provide a myth of origins of the contemporary U.S. press. I criticize inaccuracies and misleading elements in this mythology, especially regarding the political stance, readership, and content of the penny papers and their role in “revolutionizing” U.S. journalism. I also criticize the implications of this mythology for subsequent debate about U.S. journalism, especially regarding the relationship between objectivity, market forces, and freedom of the press. [Editor's Note: An exchange between four journalism history scholars and Nerone follows this essay.]

Poe on the Beat: "Doings of Gotham" as Urban, Penny Press Journalism

Few would argue that Edgar Allan Poe depended upon journalism, and in particular magazines, for his professional and financial sustenance. He wrote for the magazines of his day, and he hoped to establish his own magazine-of the high-class variety. Poe regretted having to work for such popular journals as Graham's, which he edited during 1841 to 1842, because he disliked having to adapt his writing for a popular audience. That he increasingly had to do so in order to find outlets for his work is one of the issues which Poe scholars

Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers

The Ideal of Objectivity The Revolution in American Journalism in the Age of Egalitarianism: The Penny Press Telling Stories: Journalism as a Vocation After 1880 Stories and Information: Two Journalisms in the 1890s Objectivity Becomes Ideology: Journalism After World War I Objectivity, News Management, and the Critical Culture

The Entertaining Press

This article, a study of sensationalism In the early Boston press, presents the thesis that the colonial press, especially in Boston, catered to a mass literate audience by stressing stories of sensation, human interest and scandal. It attacks the conventional view that the modern press, which emphasizes entertainment, was born In the mid-nineteenth century in the form of the "penny press. " A close analysis of the early Boston press shows that most of the features of the modern press were present well before the turn of the nineteenth century. Three factors contributed to this journalistic development. First, the early American press inherrted a tradition of sensationalism from the English press, a culture reinforced throughout the eighteenth century by the colonial press's reliance on British newspapers for copy. Second, the urban and frontier environments of colonial America provided a steady pattern of violent and sensational events about which enterprising printers were eager to publish stories. Third, mass literacy in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, which cut across social classes, stimulated the colonial printer's efforts to publish an entertaining newspaper This study is based on a content analysis of Boston newspapers published in the period 1704-1784. It concentrates on a sample of issues of all known papers published in the colony in six randomly selected years: 1710, 1720, 1740, 1748, 1768, and 1784. Nearly 1,800 stories are Included in the analysis.

Political Cartoons in the History Classroom

FOR A LONG TIME we history teachers considered art and architecture somewhat outside our province; the few works that appeared in our textbooks usually served simply a decorative function as visual aids, without being integrated into the body of the narrative. In recent years, however, there has been an encouraging trend among textbook writers and history teachers to use the works of artists and architects as evidence equally as worthy of our attention as official documents, letters, diaries, and other print materials.1 Perhaps the least explored art form for serious historical analysis is the political cartoon. The cartoon first flourished in the nineteenth century with the advent of the mass press and improved printing technology, especially graphic reproduction. Politicians everywhere soon felt the power of political art in the penny press; French officials winced at Honor6 Daumier's lithographs and sent him to jail for six months in the 1830's for a cartoon ridiculing Louis Philippe. In the early 1870's New York's Boss Tweed is said to have feared Thomas Nast's stinging caricatures in Harper's Weekly more than any attack

"Penny Papers": The Vanderbilt Newspaper Crusade

"Penny Papers": The Vanderbilt Newspaper Crusade

A Penny Paper's Review of Emerson's Essays (1841)

A Penny Paper's Review of Emerson's Essays (1841)

"Seven Penny papers of my own"

"Seven Penny papers of my own"

"7 Penny Papers of my own"

"7 Penny Papers of my own"