Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. John Maxwell Hamilton. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 680 pp. $45 hbk.

This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence. Full of bright word paintings, Journalism’s Roving Eye touches on almost all big- and small-picture issues, and provides a pithy review of U.S. journalism history from colonial times to the present. Since, as author John Maxwell Hamilton argues in the last chapter, virtually all mass communication today has an international component, the book is a most welcome addition to complementary reading lists in journalism history undergraduate classes and could interest graduate students despite its lack of a theoretical framework. [Read more...]