history book reviews — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy

What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy. Edward P. Morgan. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 405 pp.

The late A. J. Liebling, press critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed from time to time that, “By not reporting there are a lot of things you can avoid finding out.” In this book, Edward P. Morgan, university distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University, recounts what we avoided finding out about the 1960s and how that has shaped our stereotypes of the decade. This book is a must-read for journalists and journalism students not only because it tells us of important media history, but also because of the implications of that history for today. [Read more...]

Book Review – War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront

War with Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Tom Reilly, edited by Manley Witten. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 335 pp.

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-1848) is easy to overlook. It was a relatively short war, after all, pitting the nascent power of the United States against a divided Mexico and its irrepressible leader, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

Yet the Mexican War looms large in the history of American war reporting as the first U.S. foreign conflict covered by an enterprising band of professional journalists and amateur correspondents. As documented by the late Tom Reilly, a journalism historian at California State University-Northridge, Mexican War reporting was an important test of American journalism’s newfound energy and its fraught relations with the military, issues that would surface in later U.S. wars. [Read more...]

Book Review – Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor

Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor. David Witwer. University of Illinois Press, 2009. 336 pp.

The connection between organized crime and organized labor has long been a subject of contention among scholars of the history of the United States. The most recurrent narrative involves good men who rise through the ranks of labor only to be seduced by power and money, leading them to pair with ruffians. While the membership suffers and business owners tremble with fear, criminal enterprises are allowed to fester while an inert and ineffective government fails to curtail this menace. Only through the grace of crusading outsiders, such as journalists, will the corruption meet its end. [Read more...]

Book Review – Refiguring Mass Communication: A History

Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press “History of Communications” series, 2010. 261 pp.

This is a rhetorical and historical study into what the term “mass communication” has meant since (and even well before) the term first appeared nearly a century ago.

A member of the University of Colorado communication faculty who began his academic work in religious studies and then turned to intellectual history, Peter Simonson organizes his argument around narrative accounts of five key figures and their own communicative worlds—three of them predating the modern conceptions of mass communication. Indeed, he redefines the very concept by using these significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history. As he puts it in the introduction, his is a study of changes in “mass communication as a social concept, a rhetorical utterance, and a heterogeneous family of social forms.” [Read more...]

Book Review – Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon

Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon. Harlen Makemson. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. 272 pp.

Harlen Makemson has written a thorough and well-researched history of America’s lunar program through three perspectives. The charge given the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its birth in 1958 was to provide “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities.” But the agency had no guidelines for how to accomplish that goal. Makemson, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, details some of the internal battles within the agency and between its early public relations apparatus and the press as NASA struggled to find a balance between information control and transparency. During some early crises, critics charged that NASA actually stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” [Read more...]

Book Review – Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains

Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains. Brian McNair. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

It’s no news to anyone who watches movies that journalism is a perennial and popular subject. Tales of intrepid investigative reporters working the mean streets at home or in exotic locations abroad, and who overcome countless obstacles as they doggedly seek the truth are, as Brian McNair observes in Journalists in Film: Heroes and Villains, inherently dramatic. Toss in compelling—if flawed—personalities to add some human interest, and you have a recipe for cinematic success.

You also have a useful—if also flawed—teaching tool. I have included popular films in both my media law and media ethics classes for many years. Although some purport to be docudramas adopting a serious and reverential tone—All the President’s Men (1976) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) immediately come to mind—many are unabashed comedies. Even though no one would take literally the satire of His Girl Friday (1940), films with humor appeal to students, and can, by eliciting laughter, prompt thoughtful discussion and debate. [Read more...]

Book Review – A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet

A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Marshall T. Poe. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 337 pp.

This has all the signs of becoming a very important book in the field, possibly a landmark study, though such global judgments will have to await both further time and more critical reaction. In any case, understand that this is by no means just another standard media history book.

A professor of history at the University of Iowa with a number of books about Russian history to his credit, Poe has developed a new theoretical approach to the wide sweep of communications change from initial efforts at speech to the present digital era. [Read more...]

Book Review – The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars

The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars. Hugh J. Reilly. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 162 pp.

Nineteenth-century U.S. press culpability in encouraging heavy-handed military solutions regarding the troublesome Plains Indians is always worth a study. In a word, then, Hugh J. Reilly’s The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars is best described as useful.

Reilly, an associate professor of communication and Native American studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has collected newspaper accounts and editorials of nearly thirty years of press coverage of what he calls “watershed” events involving primarily Sioux, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce Indians, and their tragic relationships with the U.S. government. [Read more...]

Book Review – Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine

Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine. Kelley Massoni. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. 256 pp.

Walk into any shopping mall and you’ll see a variety of stores peddling merchandise aimed at teenagers—clothing, jewelry, music, etc. Although this focus on teen consumers might seem like the recent brainchild of a savvy marketing guru, its roots can actually be traced to a magazine.

When Seventeen made its debut in 1944, it was the first publication to recognize the potential of the teenage population, specifically, teenage girls. The magazine was initially created to provide information to teen readers who, up to that point, had no such written material produced specifically for them. The promotion of the magazine ultimately prompted an awareness of this population on the part of marketers and merchandisers, which led to the creation of an industry catering to their retail needs. [Read more...]

Book Review – Convergence Media History

Convergence Media History. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 211 pp. $125 hbk. $34.95 pbk.

Drawing on papers from a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin, where both editors teach communication and culture, the eighteen papers included in this anthology explore a variety of kinds of convergence—not simply the digital kind we are living with today.

Many of them raise provocative ideas, some from media studied before, but not with modern concepts. Most of the papers utilize motion pictures as the means and medium of study.

The papers appear in four sections. “New Methods” reviews such things as franchise histories as a study of the “negotiated process of expansion,” the study of the leftists in Hollywood from both theory and political economy approaches, the many factors once used to sell cigarettes on television, and exploring the inter-medial borders of media history. [Read more...]