Journalism 5221, Journalism & Mass Communication History
Spring 2011, Tues 5:30-8:50 pm, Annenberg Hall (AH) 304
Dr. Carolyn Kitch
/ 215-204-5077
Office hours (AH 345): Tues 3-5, Thurs 9:30-11:30
Required texts: Readings on Blackboard, as listed below.
Course description and goals
Welcome to Communication History. This is an upper-level graduate class that is designed as both a survey course and a readings seminar. Its focus is primarily journalism, but we also will learn about and discuss the roles of advertising and entertainment media. Our readings, screenings, and primary-source media will allow us to consider a range of types of mass communication, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, advertising, posters, and film. Each week I will lecture on events of media history (not necessarily covered in the readings), we will screen or read something that will help us to analyze some theme, and we will talk about the assigned readings.
This course has two primary goals. It is meant to help you gain an understanding of:
- the events, people, and issues that have shaped American communication history, and
- various approaches to doing historical research, leading to your own research project.
The readings have been chosen not only because they illuminate particular people and episodes in media history, but also because most of them are works of original scholarly research by media historians. So, while you will be reading them to learn about history, you also will be considering how these historians formulated particular research questions, what primary-source material they studied, how they employed theory to help provide context for their work, and how they chose a particular method of study the material of interest to them.
Assignments
The assignments for this class include the following:
- Notes on readings and participation in seminar discussion: 50 percent of your final grade. Your participation in class discussion is crucial to the analytical success of the class as a whole, and those discussions will be facilitated by notes on the readings that you will write and turn in. Those notes should be at least four pages long (double-spaced) and should answer these questions: what was each writer’s primary research question? what kind of historical evidence did the writer use, and how did she or he study it? what was his or her main finding(s)? was the writer’s argument convincing?
- Comprehensive exam: 20 percent of your final grade. This exam will cover the information presented in my lectures as well as some of the readings. It will assess your overall understanding of important people, events, and issues of media history.
- Research paper: 30 percent of your final grade. This paper (at least 20 pages long, double-spaced, plus references and notes) should be a work of original historical research of the nature and quality comparable to a professional conference paper. You will be graded on four aspects of this final project: your proposal; your primary-source list and working bibliography; your oral presentation; and the paper itself.
Grading standards
In a graduate seminar such as this one, an “A” represents outstanding or exceptional work that fulfills the assignments with excellence in content and execution. A “B” indicates competent work that nevertheless is not a full or well-executed completion of the assignments. A “C” means that your performance is within the parameters of the assignments and expectations, but that it is of poor quality and/or lacks depth and comprehension of the material. A failing grade of “F” means that assignments were not turned in or were extremely poorly executed, or that the student has been academically dishonest (see below).
Academic honesty and dishonesty: plagiarism and other forms of cheating
No plagiarism or cheating will be tolerated, and if you are caught at either, you will fail the course—not just the assignment, but the whole course. Plagiarism is copying work created by someone else and presenting it as your own. If you copy another person’s writing and then change a few words and phrases, it is still plagiarism (you still have taken that writer’s research and argument and presented it as your own). Other forms of cheating in writing include making up material you present as factual research and passing off work done for another class as original work done for this class. Cheating in exams includes using notes or any electronic device to get the answers.
Attendance and missed work
This course meets only once a week, and a significant amount of material will be covered every week. If you know at the start of the semester that something is going to prevent you from attending this class regularly, you should drop the class now and take it when you have the time to do so.
I realize that sometimes absences are unpredictable and unavoidable. That’s why you may be absent from one class (in the entire semester) without penalty. For each absence beyond one, your final grade will drop by half a letter grade (A goes down to A-minus, etc.). For example, if you miss four classes (which would be more than a fourth of the semester!), the highest your final grade could possibly be is a B. In certain serious circumstances, additional absences may be excused.
Special needs
Any student who has a need for accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss the specific situation as soon as possible. Disability Resources and Services at 215-204-1280 in 100 Ritter Annex should be able to coordinate reasonable accommodations for students with documented disabilities.
Access to the instructor
My office hours are listed at the top of this syllabus. You also may reach me by phone or e-mail, listed above. You can expect me to respond to email (though not necessarily a long answer to a complicated request or problem) by the following business day, assuming that I am not on academic-business travel and that the semester is still in process.
Journalism 5221, Journalism & Mass Communication History
Dr. Carolyn Kitch, Spring 2011
WEEKLY CLASS SCHEDULE
(subject to minor change)
Jan 18Course overview: Why History Matters
Jan 25Journalism in the Colonies and the New Republic
Spotlight: early American newspapers
Readings: Smith, Bradley (“The Metaphor”), Nord (“A Republican”)
Discussion of the process of doing historical research (related to final paper)
Feb 1The Penny Press; growth of magazines; advances in technology and transportation
Screening/spotlight: Penny Press papers; The Youth’s Companion
Readings: Tucher; Nerone; Shaw; List; Payne
Feb 8The abolitionist press and reporting during the Civil War
Spotlight: Civil War newspapers and photography
Readings: Hume, Mindich (“The Inverted”), Barnhurst & Nerone, Orvell
Feb 15Progress and problems of the later 19th century; yellow journalism
Screening/spotlights: photography and illustration in coverage of the Johnstown
Flood; the work of Stephen Crane, Nellie Bly, and Richard Harding Davis
Readings: Schudson (“Stories”), Smythe, Crane, Bly, Davis
Feb 22Growth of the women’s suffrage, black, and other alternative presses
Screening/spotlight: Soldiers without Swords; the work of Ida B. Wells
Readings: Barrow, Beasley & Gibbons, Mindich (“Balance”), Wells
Mar 1Muckraking, Progressivism, and World War I propaganda; the birth of film
Screening/spotlight: Reporting America at War; the work of Ida Tarbell
Readings: Czitrom, Carter, Tarbell, Kitch, West
No notes due this week
SPRING BREAK
Mar 15The emergence of modern advertising and public relations; the birth of radio;
documentary media during the Great Depression
Screenings/spotlight: Sell & Spin; excerpts from Golddiggers of 1933, 42nd Street,
and Modern Times; FSA photography
Readings: Marchand (“Consumption Ethic” and “The 1930s”)
Final-paper proposal due (no notes due this week)
Mar 22The press and propaganda in World War II
Screenings/audio: Why We Fight; Ernie Pyle; This is London
Readings: Mills, Honey, Washburn
Mar 29The early years of television news
Screening: See It Now
Readings: Lipsitz, Streitmatter, Stange
Primary-source list and working bibliography due (for final paper)
Apr 5Journalism and social change of the 60s and 70s
Screening/spotlights: Civil Rights photography; TV news coverage of Kennedy
assassination and Vietnam War; excerpt from All the President’s Men; the
work of Gloria Steinem and Michael Herr
Readings: Bradley (“Practice”), Steinem, Hallin, Herr, Schudson (“Watergate”)
Apr 12Exam
Apr 19Critical perspectives on journalism history research
Readings: Carey (“The Problem” and “Putting the World”), Nord (“A Plea”),
Marzolf, Ward, Covert, Hardt
Apr 26Student research presentations; final paper due
Journalism 5221, Journalism & Mass Communication History
Dr. Carolyn Kitch, Spring 2011
READINGS
(subject to minor change)
Jeffery A. Smith, “Public Opinion and the Press,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 105-120.
Patricia Bradley, “The Metaphor of Slavery,” from Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), pp. 1-24.
David Paul Nord, “A Republican Literature: A Study of Magazine Readers and Reading in Late Eighteenth-Century New York” and “Readership as Citizenship in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” from Communities of Journalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 175-224.
Andie Tucher,Prologue through Chapter 8 (pp. 1-84), Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
John C. Nerone, “The Mythology of the Penny Press,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 157-182.
Donald Shaw, “At the Crossroads: Change and Continuity in American Press News, 1820-1860,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 141-156.
Karen K. List, “Magazines in the Eighteenth Century,” from History of the Mass Media in the United States, ed. Margaret A. Blanchard (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), pp. 335-336.
Darwin Payne, “Magazines in the Nineteenth Century,” from History of the Mass Media in the United States, ed. Margaret A. Blanchard (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), pp. 337-339.
Janice Hume, “Death in the Civil War Era,” from Obituaries in American Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), pp. 53-91.
David T. Z. Mindich, “The Inverted Pyramid: Edwin M. Stanton and Information Control,” from Just the Facts (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 64-94.
Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, “Civic Picturing: The Regime of Illustrated News, 1856-1901,” from The Form of News (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), pp. 111-139.
Miles Orvell, “Seeing and Believing,” from American Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 61-79.
Michael Schudson, “Stories and Information: Two Journalisms in the 1890s,” from Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 88-120.
Ted Curtis Smythe, “The Reporter, 1880-1900: Working Conditions and their Influence on the News,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), p. 214-231.
Stephen Crane, “When a Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” and “An Experiment in Misery,” reprinted in Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, eds., The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 58-70.
Richard Harding Davis, “The Death of Rodriguez,” reprinted in Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, eds., The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 71-75.
Nellie Bly [Elizabeth Cochran], “Inside the Madhouse,” reprinted in Barbara Belford, Brilliant Bylines: A Biographical Anthology of Notable Newspaperwomen in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 124-49.
Lionel C. Barrow, Jr., “‘Our Own Cause’: Freedom’s Journal and the Beginnings of the Black Press, from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 54-60.
Maurine Beasley and Sheila J. Gibbons, “Ladies’ Periodicals” and “Suffrage Newspapers,” fromTaking their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism (Washington: American University Press, 1993), pp. 77-80, 81-85.
David T. Z. Mindich, “Balance: A ‘Slanderous and Nasty-Minded Mulattress,’ Ida B. Wells, Confronts ‘Objectivity’ in the 1890s,” from Just the Facts (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 113-137.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Offense,” reprinted in Taking their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism, ed. Maurine H. Beasley and Sheila J. Gibbons (Washington: American University Press, 1993), pp. 107-109.
Daniel Czitrom, “Early Motion Pictures,” from Communication in History, 4th ed., ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), pp. 186-194.
Everett Carter, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation (1915),” fromHollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, rev. ed., ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 9-19.
Ida Tarbell, excerpt from “The Rise of the Standard Oil Company,” reprinted in More than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell’s Lifetime in Journalism, ed. Robert C. Kochersburger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), pp. 69-86. Originally published in McClure’s Magazine (December 1902), pp. 115-128.
Carolyn Kitch, “Alternative Visions” and “Patriotic Images,” from The Girl on the Magazine Cover (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 75-120.
Nancy Martha West, “‘Let Kodak Keep the Story,’” from Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 166-199.
Roland Marchand, “The Consumption Ethic,” from Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 117-163.
Roland Marchand, “The 1930s: Save the System,” from Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 202-248.
Kay Mills, “The Roosevelt Rule” and “Rosie the Reporter,” from A Place in the News (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 35-62.
Maureen Honey, part of “Middle-Class Images of Women in Wartime,” from Creating Rosie the Riveter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 109-137.
Patrick S. Washburn, “J. Edgar Hoover the Black Press in World War II,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 377-388.
C. K. Doreski, “‘Kin in Some Way’: The Chicago Defender Readers the Japanese Internment, 1942-1945,” from The Black Press, ed. Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 161-187.
George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television,” from Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 39-75.
Rodger Streitmatter, “Exposing Joe McCarthy” and “Pushing the Civil Rights Movement onto the National Agenda,” from Mightier than the Sword (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 153-186.
Maren Stange, “‘Photographs Taken in Everyday Life’: Ebony’s Photojournalistic Discourse,” from from The Black Press, ed. Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 207-227.
Patricia Bradley, “The Practice of the Craft,” from Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), pp. 77-103.
Gloria Steinem, “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” fromOutrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), pp. 32-75. [Originally published as “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine (May and June 1963).]
Daniel C. Hallin, “The Media, the War in Vietnam, and Political Support: A Critique of the Thesis of an Oppositional Media,” from Media Voices, ed. Jean Folkerts (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 418-434.
Michael Herr, excerpt from Dispatches, reprinted in Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, eds., The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 494-506.
Michael Schudson, “Watergate and the Press,” fromThe Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 142-165.
James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History” and “Putting the World at Peril,” from James Carey: A Critical Reader, ed. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 86-116.
David Paul Nord, “A Plea for Journalism History,” Journalism History 15, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 8-15.
Marion Marzolf, “American Studies—Ideas for Media Historians?” Journalism History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 1, 13-16.
Jean Ward, “Interdisciplinary Research and Journalism Historians,” Journalism History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 1, 17-19.
Catherine Covert, “Journalism History and Women’s Experience: A Problem in Conceptual Change,” Journalism History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 2-6.
Hanno Hardt, “Newsworkers, Technology, and Journalism History,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 346-365.