This thematic analysis of Edward L. Godkin's editorials appearing in the "Nation" seeks to reveal the major themes on which he wrote and then, by quantitative analysis, to provide some order to the themes and to study the interaction of the themes. Five hundred and twelve editorials, written over a period of 35 years and representing…

An analysis of 1938 newspaper editorials about Orson Welles' notorious "War of the Worlds" broadcast reveals that they explained audience reaction on the grounds of gullibility, the ominous threat of war, and the technique of the broadcast, and that they offered radio a rather stern lecture on the relationship between freedom and responsibility.…

This paper narrates the history of a young printer, John Prentiss, who established the New Hampshire Sentinel in 1799--a paper which remains a community newspaper today. Examples of writing from Prentiss's training and experience explain why he was able to survive in newspaper publishing when others failed. Acknowledging that the United States…

Although the suppression in 1917 of "The Masses," an influential Socialist magazine, has been depicted as an American tragedy, such a narrow interpretation ignores the bizarre, confused, often comic developments and episodes that attended the magazine's end. A reexamination of the demise of "The Masses" has been made to show…

Noting that Hodding Carter, Jr., editor and majority owner of the Greenville, Mississippi, "Delta Democrat-Times," was considered a spokesman of and to the South regarding racial matters during the two decades between the end of World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam war, this monograph examines Carter's newspaper in the two-year…

An examination of five muckraking magazines--"Collier's,""Cosmopolitan,""McClure's,""Everybody's," and the "Arena"--reveals that while addressing many other social ills, muckraking journalists failed to take a strong stand against one of the most glaring evils of their day--the lynching of blacks.…

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a national catastrophe and the major news story of the year, was the first national labor strike in U.S. history. Because of the ideological bias of the press, specifically its implicit commitment to capitalism and to objectivity (itself a "myth" of social order), newspapers of the period could be…