Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (History of Communication)

Newspapers do more than provide information. They enter into the process of forming communities, from voluntary associations to cities to nation-states. Widely acknowledged as one of our most insightful commentators on the history of journalism in the U.S., David Paul Nord offers a lively and wide-ranging discussion of journalism as a vital component of community. In settings ranging from the religion-infused towns of colonial America to the rapidly expanding urban metropolises of the late nineteenth century, Nord explores the cultural work of the press. Newspapers helped to shape the idea of the American nation in the decades after the revolution. They helped to organize support for the abolition of slavery and for municipal reform movements, from street railway regulation to trash collection. Amid industrial upheaval, they helped to articulate a vision of public community and to build a new, collective life in the city.Nord perceives the daily press as an arena in which a broad cross-section of the populace - ethnically diverse, geographically diffuse, and economically stratified--could participate in a common culture. During times of crisis, such as the yellow fever epidemic that gripped Philadelphia in 1793, newspapers sustained the bonds of community life. Amassing concrete historical evidence, such as readers' private letters and diaries in the late eighteenth century and letters to the editor in an early twentieth-century Chicago newspaper, Nord also examines how ordinary readers make sense of what they read and how they use journalism to form community attachments and engage in civic life. Illuminating how newspapers have intersected with religion, politics, reform, and urban life over nearly three centuries, "Communities of Journalism" is a deeply satisfying contribution to the cultural history of American journalism and to the history of reading.