Frontmatter

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-05-09

Not Exactly Lying

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-04-28 · 7 citations

From fibs about royal incest in America’s first newspaper to social-media-driven conspiracy theories surrounding Barack Obama’s birthplace, Andie Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy.

Why Marmaduke Mizzle and the Good Ship Wabble Fooled No One: Fake News and Metajournalistic Discourse in the Era of Journalistic Professionalization

2022-09-20

In the first decades of the twentieth century, even as mainstream US newspapers were committing themselves to the new “professional” journalistic values of accuracy, neutrality, independence, and public service, some of those same papers were also regularly publishing humorous stories about whimsical events that took the outward form of standard news accounts but were clearly understood to be fictional. I explore two such series that appeared in influential metropolitan newspapers: the New York Sun's pieces about the misadventures of the good ship Wabble, whose single sidewheel doomed it to spend most of its time steaming in circles, and the New York Times's stories about a traveling caraway seed merchant who routinely encountered fantastic creatures in exotic parts of the world. In the first case, the apparently goofy stories yielded layers of meaning, messages, and pointed metajournalistic argument about the style, tactics, and credibility of journalism in an era of change. In the other case, the apparently goofy stories were in fact exactly that, and nobody paid much attention to them. A comparative analysis offers some insights into how readers and reporters together made meaning and evaluated knowledge from the surprisingly unfamiliar text that is the historical newspaper.

6 “NOTHING THAT IS NOT INTERESTING IS NEWS”

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-05-09

The Transnational Turn and the Dilemma of the "phenomenal mix"

Journal of Transnational American Studies · 2020-11-17

This essay explores the special challenges of “transnationalizing” a half-semester history survey course designed for nonhistorians in a graduate journalism school. The course has just seven weeks to address a huge array of material. Many of the students have not taken a single history course since high school. And while many of them, both US citizens and international students, have been pleasantly surprised to find that the course includes material they find relevant to their own experience, in the time we have it is not possible to validate everyone’s lives through inclusion. Navigating the dilemmas of identity in a diverse and fragmented public sphere is, of course, not a new challenge for people who do history for a living, but it may be instructive for journalists as well, whose everyday work also involves constituting meaningful narratives that satisfactorily explain why things happen.

Ephron, Nora (19 May 1941–26 June 2012), screenwriter, film director, journalist, and humorist

American National Biography Online · 2018-02-15

Ephron, Nora (19 May 1941–26 June 2012), screenwriter, film director, journalist, and humorist

American National Biography Online · 2018-02-15

Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman

The Journal of Southern History · 2017-01-01

Reviewed by: Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman Andie Tucher Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front. By J. Matthew Gallman. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 327. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2099-2.) How did Union civilians figure out what “duty” meant during the Civil War, a crisis bigger and more complicated than anything America had ever seen? How did ordinary northerners who wanted the Union to win decide what they themselves should or would contribute to the victory? In this rich study J. Matthew Gallman explores one critical and almost universal action: reading. Drawing on a vast array of newspapers, magazines, novels, pamphlets, sermons, songs, poems, cartoons, and comic papers, Gallman argues that a vast public conversation about personal responsibility and the meaning of citizenship was shaped by the popular press. Part 1 is devoted to satire. Especially during the first years of the war, humorists, cartoonists, and novelists constructed a range of stereotyped figures whom civilians could safely and righteously mock: empty-headed dandies and coquettes enjoying a giddy social life; hypocritical “shoulder straps,” who strutted in officers’ uniforms but never actually set foot on a battlefield (chap. 2); and profiteers and the “shoddy aristocracy,” who exploited the wartime market for their own gain (chap. 3). By offering themselves up for derision, these characters marked the outer boundaries of acceptable behavior during the crisis. The boundaries, in Gallman’s telling, turned out to be generous, only excluding actions that were excessively dishonest, venal, or crass, and gently embracing the candid self-assessments and modest readjustments made by generally well-intentioned civilians navigating a changed world. [End Page 180] Part 2 turns to an examination of the messages directed at men and women, white and black, who were making hard choices about their own duty. Should I enlist? Should I actively avoid the draft? Should I encourage my sweetheart to sign up? Should I volunteer as a nurse? Should I fight for white men who deny me basic rights? Gallman describes a literature that, at least for white and middle-class readers, encouraged individual decision making based on the honest evaluation of one’s own circumstances, rarely if ever making overt appeals to patriotism or invoking the rights and obligations of citizenship. The much more limited universe of printed materials that specifically addressed African American readers, in contrast, focused more on reciprocal rights and collective responsibilities. Gallman concludes that the Union “relied on individual citizens to make informed decisions,” and individual citizens relied in large part on their novels, newspapers, poems, and cartoons for that information (p. 252). Gallman is an insightful, indefatigable guide to this immense body of literature and offers an intriguing and intimate perspective on what people may have thought about during the crisis of war. Yet his efforts to shape a wildly diverse corpus—which ranged from rude jokes to syrupy novels to orotund sermons and was cobbled by motley legions of often faceless scribblers, advocates, elites, and hacks—into the building blocks of a coherent and prescriptive “cultural conversation” can sometimes feel a little uncomfortable (p. 13). While Part 1 makes a compelling case for the importance of satirists as boundary workers, Gallman’s later section on romantic fiction struggles to make a consistent argument out of shelffuls of sentimental complications that sometimes seemed to use the war as simply another scenic backdrop. There are few acknowledgments of the Miltonian marketplace of ideas or of the commercial marketplace. Surely some of these materials sank without a trace, were roundly repudiated, or did duty as straw men, while others certainly served mainly as guilty pleasures or outhouse reading. Yet Gallman gives all printed materials equal weight as participants in the conversation. Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front is lucid, informative, and admirably researched, and it offers an invaluable glimpse into the teeming world of ideas in print—but neither all print nor all ideas are created equal. Andie Tucher Columbia University Copyright © 2017 The Southern...

“I believe in faking”: The Dilemma of Photographic Realism at the Dawn of Photojournalism

Photography and Culture · 2017-06-01 · 13 citations

From about 1885 to 1910, the concept of the “fake” was an integral part of an ongoing debate in the USA over how best to represent reality for a mass journalistic audience. Nothing like the nefarious fraud its name might suggest, the term generally referred to the modest embellishment, invention, or correction of details in a story or a photograph to make it seem more vivid and truer to life. In both the newspaper press and the world of photography, some practitioners initially embraced the tactic as both useful for the practitioner and beneficial to the public. After the growing condemnation of the fake in the newspaper world helped to cement the increasing dominance of the professionalized journalist, in photography a vigorous debate carried out in the trade and popular press over the propriety and consequences of manipulating images helped to mark the boundaries of the emerging profession of photojournalism. The debate resonates to this day.

The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards (review)

Technology and Culture · 2016-01-01 · 2 citations

Reviewed by: The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards Andie Tucher (bio) The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918. By Elizabeth Edwards. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi+ 326. $29.95. During the thirty or so years bracketing 1900, hundreds of amateur photographers wandered through English cities, towns, and countrysides making tens of thousands of images of churches, gates, cottages, rood screens, mills, castles, door jambs, threshing flails, baptismal fonts, sheep roasts, bridges, and the odd farmer in gaiters and smock. In an era of swift and sometimes disorienting change in the social and cultural landscape, dozens of local photographic surveys—carried out mainly by hobbyists and camera clubs within loose and shifting networks that could also include libraries, scientific societies, and other civic institutions—sought to preserve for future generations the material remains of England’s past. A few of the photographs were strikingly beautiful, most were ordinary, some were aesthetically dreadful or technically inept. All had been generally ignored by scholars before they caught the attention of visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards, who, in this original and sophisticated work, explores what they demonstrate about “the complexity and ambiguity that emerged around photography, ideas of evidence, and history in the popular imagination” (p. xii). Edwards takes an ethnographic approach to her analysis of the surviving survey photographs (she has looked at 55,000 of them) and of the discourse about such surveys in contemporary photographic periodicals. Her chapters unfold thematically, not chronologically, and they examine the manifold tensions inherent in the efforts to negotiate a relationship between photography and the historical imagination: tensions between the local and the national, between the amateur and the professional, between disappearance and salvage, between the dominant pictorialist aesthetic—subjective, individualistic, even selfish—and the qualities of what were often called “record” prints, deriving from the photographer’s “sense of duty and the moral values of objectivity constituted through diligence and self-restraint” (p. 84). Some of her analysis challenges conventional wisdom and comes to surprising conclusions. Given that the survey movement coincided with [End Page 254] the height of Britain’s global empire and the flourishing of what might be called an imperial consciousness throughout many institutions of British life, it would be easy to assume that this genteel effort to preserve the nation’s disappearing past was yet another exercise of the imperialist imagination. Edwards, however, sees “no direct appeal to empire or to overtly imperialistic sentiment within the rhetoric of the survey” (p. 154), which was instead inward-looking and local. Nor should the surveys be dismissed as merely nostalgic, she contends, or as rooted in a romantic or even reactionary melancholy over the loss of a (possibly imaginary) social order. She argues that while the discourse about the surveys did incorporate conservative strands, it also expressed a dynamic and complex sense of the relationships between past, present, and future. The photographs “served not only as a reminder of how things ‘were,’ but of how things ‘are.’ … A sense of loss was coupled with a dynamic view of the potential of photographs to at least partially counter that loss” (p. 165). Edwards’s handsome book is not an easy read, particularly for anyone not well versed in (or anyone impatient with) critical theory. It’s not an easy view, either. She does state plainly that although the 115 historical photographs accompanying the text were chosen as “typical” and “relevant to the point under discussion,” they are “in a sense … interchangeable” since her focus was “the photography complex,” not the individual image (p. 27). But some of the chosen individual images are indeed specifically analyzed in the text, others that are invoked and described aren’t shown, and in many cases, the text directs us to examine a particular photograph without offering any clue as to what we are supposed to take from that examination or how it was “relevant” to the point. This is, by design, a book about 55,000 photographs, not about some photographs; it is more concerned with how people engaged with a kind of image than with how they created images. While some scholars may...