Edward Willis Scripps revolutionized the newspaper industry by applying modern business practices. His press empire grew to more than forty newspapers supported by a telegraphic news service and an illustrated news features syndicate. Convinced that big business was corrupting the American press, Scripps resisted supporting his newspapers through advertising. He also aimed them at the working class, an audience virtually ignored by most newspaper publishers of his era. 

Drawing on Scripps's business correspondence, Gerald Baldasty provides a portrait of a long-neglected entrepreneurial giant. Maintaining that the press should support the democratic endeavor by informing its largest constituency, Scripps succeeded in creating a string of small, one-penny newspapers that advocated for the common people by crusading for lower streetcar fares, free textbooks for public school children, municipal ownership of utilities, and pure food legislation, among many other causes.

From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.

E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.

Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.

Like The Education of Henry Adams, the early twentieth-century classic from which this book derives its name, Adams described the ascent, or descent, of a postwar social and political order into something that a few people called modernity. But Dumas follows this evolution, not in the United States as Adams did, but in insular Arkansas.

Beginning with the defeat of Governor Francis Cherry by the son of a hillbilly socialist at the end of the Joe McCarthy era, Dumas traces the development of a modernist political cast that eventually produced Arkansas’s first president of the United States. It follows the seed from 1978 that would germinate into the second impeachment of an American president.

Dumas has written for newspapers and about politics for sixty-three years, since 1954, the year that the stolid Cherry fell to Orval Eugene Faubus. The book is a political memoir that describes not only his education in the ways of politicians but the politicians’ own education and miseducation in how you win voters and then how you get things done.

It is mostly a collection of untold stories, often deeply personal, that reveal the inner struggles and sometimes the tribulations of the state’s leaders—Cherry, Faubus, Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, John McClellan, J. William Fulbright, Bill Clinton, Jim Guy Tucker, and others.

Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is an intellectual biography of a long-forgotten radical female journalist in Portland, whose daily women’s columns provide a window into the breadth of intellectual radicalism in Progressive Era journalism. Baldwin was one of an early generation of female journalists who were hired to lure female readers to the daily newspaper’s department store advertisements. Instead of catering to the demands of consumerism, Baldwin quickly brought an anti-capitalist, antiracist agenda to her column, “The Woman’s Point of View." She eschewed household hints and instead focused on the immorality of capitalists and imperialists while emphasizing the need for women to become independent and productive citizens. 
 
A century before the Occupy movement and the Women’s March, Baldwin spoke truth to power. Imbued with a New Thought spirituality that presumed progressive thought could directly affect material reality, she wrote to move history forward. And yet, the trajectory of history proved as hard to forecast then as now.  While her personal story seems to embody a modern progressivism, blending abolition with labor reform and anti-banker activism—positions from which she never wavered—her path grew more complicated as times changed in the aftermath of World War I, when she would advocate on behalf of both the Bolsheviks and the Ku Klux Klan.
 
In this deeply researched and nuanced account of Eleanor Baldwin’s intellectual journey, historian Larry Lipin reveals how even the most dedicated radical can be overcome by unforeseen events. Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View restores a missing chapter in Portland’s Progressive Era history and rescues this passionate, intriguing, and quixotic character from undeserved obscurity.

Elusion Aforethought provides significant new material on the work of crime and detection fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox, a popular and prolific English journalist, satirist, and novelist in the period between World Wars I and II. Cox has been called one of the most important and influential of Golden Age detective fiction writers by such authorities as Haycraft, Symons, and Keating, yet he occupies a surprisingly ambivalent position in the history of the crime genre.