Textbooks and General Histories of Journalism

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Altschull, J. Herbert.  From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism.  Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1990.

Amenta, Edwin, and Neal Caren.  Rough Draft of History: A Century of US Social Movements in the News.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.  New York: Verso, 1991.

Apple, Rima D., Gregory J. Downey, and Stephen L. Vaughn, eds. Science in Print: Essays on the History of Science and the Culture of Print. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

Aucoin, James L. “The Investigative Tradition in American Journalism.” American Journalism 14, no. 3–4 (1997): 317–29.

Azocar, Cristina.  News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition.  Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022.

Barkin, Steve M. “The Journalist as Storyteller: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.” American Journalism 1, no. 2 (1984): 27–34.

Barnhurst, Kevin G.  Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to the Digital. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Bartholomew, Robert E., and Benjamin Radford.  The Martians Have Landed!: A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Bauer, A.J.  “Conservative News Cultures and the Future of Journalism History.” American Journalism 40:3 (2023): 338-346.

Baughman, James L. “The World is Ruled By Those Who Holler the Loudest: The Third-Person Effect in American Journalism History.” Journalism History 16:1/2 (Spring/Summer 1989): 12-19.

Baughman, James J., Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky, eds.  Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Beasley, Maureen H.  Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism. Washington DC: American University Press, 1993.

Bernhard, Jim.  Porcupines, Picayunes, and Posts: How Newspapers Get Their Names.  Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008.

Best, Kate Nelson.  The History of Fashion Journalism.  London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Black, Jeremy.  The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Blanchard, Margaret A.  “The Ossification of Journalism History: A Challenge for the 21st Century.”  Journalism History 25 (August 1999): 107-112.

Blevens, Frederick. “The Shifting Paradigms of Investigative Journalism in the 20th Century.” American Journalism 14, no. 3–4 (1997): 257–61.

Bleyer, William G.  Main Currents in the History of American Journalism.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

Borchard, Gregory A.  A Narrative History of the American Press.  New York: Routledge, 2018.

Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke.  A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet.  2 ed.  Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005.

Burner, David, and Thomas R. West.  Columns Right: Conservative Journalists in the Service of Nationalism.  New York: New York University Press, 1988.

Carey, James W. Communication and Culture: Essays on Media and Society.  New York: Routledge, 1992.

Castagnaro, Mario. “Embellishment, Fabrication, and Scandal: Hoaxing and the American Press.”  PhD dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009.

Chaisson, Lloyd, ed.  The Press in Times of Crisis.  Westport, CT: Prager, 1995.*

Chaisson, Lloyd, ed.  Three Centuries of American Media.  Englewood, CO: Morton Publishing, 1999.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr, and James W. Cortada, eds.  A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information has Shaped the Unites States from Colonial Times to the Present.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Cline, Hugh F.  Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation: A Social and Historical Perspective.  New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.

Cochran, Thomas C.  “Media as Business: A Brief History.”  Journal of Communication 25 (Autumn 1975): 155-165.

Connery, Thomas B.  Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life.  Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

Consuegra, David.  American Type: Design & Designers.  New York: Allworth Press, 2004.

Cook, Philip S. et .al. eds.  American Media: The Wilson Quarterly Reader.  Washington: Wilson Center Press, 1989.

Cora, Ronald, and William Henry Longton.  The Conservative Press in the Twentieth Century.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Cray, Ed, Jonathan Kotler, and Miles Beller, eds.  American Dateline: Major News Stories from Colonial Times to the Present.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Czitrom, Daniel. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Daly, Christopher B. Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Daniels, Jonathan.  They Will Be Heard: America’s Crusading Newspaper Editors.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Davis, Caroline, ed.  Print Cultures: A Reader in Theory and Practice.  New York: Red Globe Press, 2019.

DiCenzo, Maria.  Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals, and the Public Sphere.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

DiGirolamo, Vincent.  Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys.   New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Dommann, Monika, and Sarah Pybus.  Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019.

Douglas, Sara U.  Labor’s New Voice: Unions and the Mass Media.  Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986.

Dunaway Taylor, Welford, ed.  The Newsprint Mask: The Tradition of the Fictional Journalist in America. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991.

Durham, Frank D., and Thomas P. Oates.  Forming the Public: A Critical History of Journalism in the United States.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024.

Eason, David L.  “The New Social History of the Newspaper.”  Communication Research 11 (January 1984): 141-151.

Edwards, Paul N., et. al.  “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review 116: 5 (December 2011), 1393-1435.

Ehrlich, Matthew C., and Joe Salzman.  Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Emery, Michael, ed. The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media. 9th edition.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Evensen, Bruce J.  Journalism and the American Experience.  New York: Routledge, 2018.

Fang, Irving E.  A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions.  Boston: Focal Press, 1997.

Farrar, Ronald T., and John D. Stevens, eds.  Mass Media and the National Experience: Essays in Communication History.  New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Finneman, Teri, and Erika Pribanic-Smith, eds.  Social Justice, Activism, and Diversity in U.S. Media History.  New York: Routledge, 2023.

“The Fourth Estate, 100th Anniversary, 1884-1984.”  Editor and Publisher (31 March 1984).  370 page special issue

Fleming, Dan B.  “Benjamin Franklin to Watergate: The Press in U.S. History Textbooks.” Journalism Quarterly 61 (1984): 885-88.

Fleming, Thomas.  Behind the Headlines: Great Moments in American Newspaper History.  New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Folkerts, Jean, and Dwight L. Teeter.  Voices of a Nation: A History of Mass Media in the United States.  3rd ed.  Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.

Ford, Edwin H., and Edwin Emery, eds.  Highlights in the History of the American Press.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.

Forsyth, David Pond.  “The Rise of the Business Press in the United States, 1750-1865.” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962.

Fuller, Linda K. and Lilless McPherson Shilling. Dictionary of Quotations in Communications. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Garfrerick, Beth H. Twentieth Century Weekly Community Newspapers in the United States. New York: Peter Lang, 2023. 

Garza, Melita M., Michael Fuhlhage, and Tracy Lucht, eds.  The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History.  New York: Routledge, 2023.

Gillespie, Tarlton, Pablo J. Baczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, eds.  Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.

Golia, Julie Annette. “Advising America: Advice Columns and the Modern American Newspaper, 1895–1955.” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2010.

Gonzalez, Juan, and Joseph Torres.  News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.  New York: Verso, 2011.

Gordon, George N.  The Communications Revolution: A History of Mass Media in the United States.  New York: Hastings House, 1977.

Gorman, Lyn, and David McLean.  Media and Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction.  New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2002. 

Gregory, Winifred, ed.  American Newspapers, 1821-1936.  New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1937.

David Gudelunas, David.  Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education.  New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008. 

Harris, Jr., Roy J.  Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism.  Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Head, Sydney W., Christopher H. Sterling, and Lemuel B. Schofield.  Broadcasting in America: A Survey of Electronic Media.  7th ed.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Henkin, David M.  The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Hills, Jill. Telecommunications and Empire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.   

Holt, Jennifer, and Alisa Perren, eds. Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas W. Keenan, eds.  New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2 ed.  New York: Routledge, 2016.*

Hutt, Allen.  The Changing Newspaper: Typographic Trends in Britain and America, 1622-1972.  London: Gordon Fraser, 1973.

Jensen, Carl.  Stories that Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century.  New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000.

John, Richard R.  “Debating New Media: Rewriting Communications History.” Technology and Culture 64:2 (April 2023): 308-358.

Jones, Robert W.  Journalism in the United States.  New York: Dutton, 1947.

Karolevitz, Robert F.  From Quill to Computer: The Story of America’s Community Newspapers.  National Newspaper Foundation, 1985.

Keever, Beverly Ann D., Carolyn Martindale, and Mary Ann Weston, eds.  U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934-1996.  New York: Greenwood Press, 1997.  

Kellstedt, Paul M.  The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Keppeler, Jill. Newspapers throughout American HistoryJourney to the Past: Investigating Primary Sources. New York: Gareth Stevens, 2020.

Kobre, Sidney.  Development of American Journalism.  Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown Co., 1969.

Kroeger, Brooke. Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012.

Knowlton, Steven R., and Karen Freeman, eds.  Fair and Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity.  Northport, Ala.: Vision Press, 2005.

Krause, Monika. “Reporting and the Transformations of the Journalistic Field: U.S. News Media, 1890–2000.” Media, Culture, and Society 33 (January 2011): 89–104.

Lacy, Dan M.  From Grunts to Gigabytes: Communications and Society.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Lanosga, Gerry. “The Press, Prizes, and Power: Investigative Reporting in the United States, 1917–1960.”  PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2011. 

Lanosga, Gerry.  “New Views of Investigative Reporting in the Twentieth Century.” American Journalism 31:4 (Fall 2014): 490-506.

Lee, Alfred McClung.  The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument.  New York: Macmillan, 1937.

Lee, James M.  History of American Journalism.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917.

Liebovich, Louis W. “Economics and United States Newspapers.” Journalism History 18 (January 1992): 41-44.  

Lora, Ronald, and William Henry Longton, eds.  The Conservative Press in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century America.  Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.*

Lloyd, Mark.  Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Lumsen, Linda.  Social Justice Journalism: A Cultural History of Social Movement Media From Abolition to #womensmarch.  New York: Peter Lang, 2019.

McChesney, Robert and William Solomon, eds.  Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

McKerns, Joseph P.  “The History of American Journalism: A Bibliographic Essay.”  American Studies International 15:1 (Autumn 1976): 17-34.

McNeil, Peter.  Fashion Journalism: History, Theory, and Practice.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

McMurtrie, Douglas.  A History of Printing in the United States.  New York: Bowker, 1936.

Malin, Brenton.  Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America.  New York: NYU Press, 2014.

Mari, Will.  “Technology in the Newsroom.”  Journalism Studies 19:9 (July 2018): 1366-1389.  1920s-60s

Marzio, Peter C.  The Men and Machines of American Journalism.  Washington DC: National Museum of History and Technology, 1973.

Marzolf, Marion T.  Up From the Footnote: A History of Woman Journalists. New York: Hastings House, 1997.

Mascaro, Thomas A.  “Congress Needs Help: A Case Study in Documentary Journalism History.” Journalism History 41:3 (Fall 2015): 118-128.

Mattelart, Armand.  The Invention of Communication.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Memmel, Scott. “Pressing the Police and Policing the Press: The History and Law of the Relationship Between the News Media and Law Enforcement in the United States.” PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2020.

Merrill, John C.  The Elite Press: Great Newspapers of the World.  New York: Pitman, 1968.

Mindich, David T.Z.  “Searching for Journalism History in Cyberspace.”  American Journalism 15:1 (1998): 103-08. 

Moore, Paul, and Sandra Gabriele.  The Sunday Paper: A Media History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022.

Moran, Terance P.  Introduction to the History of Communication: Evolutions & Revolutions.  New York: Peter Lang, 2010.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan Company, 1962.

Nadler, Anthony, and A.J. Bauer, eds.  News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.   Several essays deal with the history of conservative media.

Nerone, John.  “Does Journalism History Matter?”  American Journalism 28:3 (Fall 2011): 7-27.

Nerone, John.  The Media and Public Life: A History.  Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

Nicholas, Sian, and Tom O’Malley, eds.  Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives.  New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.

Nord, David Paul.  Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Ostertag, Bob.  People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.

Parcell, Lisa M.  “Newspaper Newswriting Style, 1690-1970.”  PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 2003.

Patnode, Randall.  The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023.

Peters, John D.  Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Peters, John D., and Peter Simonson, eds.  Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968.  Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Pettegree, Andrew.  The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Pilger, John, ed.  Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism that Changed the World.  New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.

Pilgrim, Tim A.  “Newspapers as Natural Monopolies: Some Historical Considerations.” Journalism History 18 (1992): 3-10.

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

The Power of Print in American History, 1776-1976.  New York: St. Regis, 1977.

Publisher’s Auxiliary.  Journalism Bicentennial History Series.  8 vols.  Washington DC: National Newspaper Association, 1975.

Randall, David.  The Great Reporters.  Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005.

Rainbolt, William R.  “The Image of Journalism in American Films, 1946-1976.”  PhD dissertation, State University of New York-Albany, 2004.

Rhodes, Jane. “The Visibility of Race and Media History.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 No. 2 (June 1993): 184-190.

Risley, Ford.  American Journalism: A History.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

Risley, Ford, and Ashley Walter.  How America Gets the News: A History U.S. Journalism.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024.

Ritchie, Donald A.  “The Past Meets the Press: Historians and the News Media.”  Maryland Historian 30 (Spring 2006): 61–71.

Roberts, Jessica, and Adam Maksl. Attacks on the American Press: A Documentary and Reference Guide. Documentary and Reference Guides. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, 2021. 

Rosenberg, Emily S.  A World Connecting, 1870-1945.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Rothmyer, Karen.  Winning Pulitzers: The Stories Behind Some of the Best News Coverage of Our Time.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Russell, Dennis. “The Journalistic Autobiography: How Reporters View Themselves and Order Their Experience.” Studies in Popular Culture 18.1 (1995) 83-99. 

Rutland, Robert A.  The Newsmongers: Journalism in the Life of the Nation, 1690-1972.  New York: Dial Press, 1973.

Schiller, Dan.  “Objectivity and Professionalism in American News Reporting.”  Journal of Communication 29:4 (Autumn 1979): 46-57.

Schudson, Michael.  Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.  New York: Basic Books, 1978.

Schudson, Michael.  The Power of News.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Schudson, Michael.  “Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History.”  Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (Autumn 1997): 463-476.

Shapiro, Bruce, ed.  Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America.  New York: Nation Books, 2003.

Simon, Rita, and Susan H. Alexander. The Ambivalent Welcome: Print Media, Public Opinion, and Immigration. New York: Praeger, 1993.

Simonson, Peter. Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Slauter, Will.  Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright.  Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Sloan, Wm. David.  Perspectives on Mass Communication History.  Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Assoc., 1991.

Sloan, Wm. David. ed. The Media in America: A History, 10th ed.  Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2017.

Sloan, Wm. David, ed.  Media and Religion in American History.  Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2000.*

Smith, Carol, and Carolyn Stuart Dyer.  “Taking Stock, Placing Orders: A Historiographic Essay on the Business History of Journalism.” Journalism Monographs No. 132 (April 1992).

Stabile, Carol A., ed.  Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies.  Boulder: Westview Press, 2000.

Staiger, Janet, and Sabine Hake, eds. Convergence Media History. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Stamm, Michael.  Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth Century North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Starr, Paul.  The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Startt, James D., and Wm. David Sloan.  The Significance of the Media in American History.  Northport, AL: Vision Press, 1994.

Stein, M.L. Blacks in Communications: Journalism, Public Relations, and Advertising. New York: Julian Messner, 1972.

Steiner, Linda, and Clifford Christians.  Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies: The History of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Stephens, Mitchell.  A History of News.  3 ed.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Stevens, John D. and Hazel Dickin-Garcia.  Communication History.  Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980.

Streitmatter, Rodger.  From Perverts to “Fab Five”: The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians.  New York: Routledge, 2009.

Streitmatter,  Rodger.  A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Streitmatter, Rodger.  Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History, 4th ed.  New York: Routledge, 2015.

Tebbel, John.  The Compact History of American Newspapers.  New York: Hawthorne Books, 1969.

Tebbel, John.  The Media in America: How They Have Shaped Our History and Culture.  New York: Crowell, 1974.

Tucher, Andie.  “Why Journalism History Matters: The Gaffe, the Stuff, and the Historical Imagination.”  American Journalism 31:4 (Fall 2014): 432-444.

Tucher, Andie. Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Underwood, Doug.  From Yahweh to Yahoo: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press.  Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Vos, Tim P. “Functionalist Explanations in Media Histories: A Historiographical Essay.” American Journalism 35:4 (Fall 2018): 490-503.

Wallace, Aurora.  Newspapers and the Making of Modern America: A History.  Westport: Greenwood, 2005. 

Weston, Mary Ann.  Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth-Century Press. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Weisberger, Bernard A.  The American Newspaperman.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Weston, Mary Ann. Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth-Century Press. New York: Praeger, 1996.

Whitfield, Stephen J. “The Jewish Contribution to American Journalism.” American Journalism 3 (1986): 99–112.

Winseck, Dwayne R., and Robert M. Pike.  Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Wright, Russell O.  Chronology of Communication in the United States.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.

Wu, Tim.  The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  New York: Knopf, 2010.

Wurtzler, Steve J. Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray, eds.  The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Zelizer, Barbie, ed. Explorations in Communication and History.  New York: Routledge, 2008.

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