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This superb biography provides for the first time a candid look at the remarkable life of Walter Williams, the man who founded the world's first school of journalism and perhaps contributed more toward the promotion of professional journalism than any other person of his time.

Williams, the youngest of six children, was born in Boonville, Missouri, in 1864. Never an athletic child, he always had a love of books and of learning; yet, he scarcely had a high school education. He began his journalistic career as a printer's devil at seventy cents per week and eventually became editor and part- owner of a weekly in Columbia, Missouri. During his time as an editor, Williams became convinced that journalism would never reach its potential until its practitioners had the opportunity for university training in their field. After years of crusading, he established the first journalism school, on the University of Missouri campus. Later, he was chosen president of the University of Missouri, which he led with distinction during the Great Depression.

Williams was an unwavering advocate of high professional standards. His Journalist's Creed became one of the most widely circulated codes of professional ethics. Williams inspired the confidence of his fellow journalists, and he carried his message to nearly every country in which newspapers were published. Not only did he invent journalism education, he also created global organizations of journalists and spread the gospel of professionalism throughout the world. His death, in 1935, was mourned throughout the United States, and editorial tributes came from around the world. As one British editor succinctly put it, "Williams was not born to greatness. Neither was it thrust upon him. Literally, he achieved greatness."

A Life of Albert Pike, originally published in 1997, is as much a study of antebellum Arkansas as it is a portrait of the former general. A native of Massachusetts, Pike settled in Arkansas Territory in 1832 after wandering the Great Plains of Texas and New Mexico for two years. In Arkansas he became a schoolteacher, newspaperman, lawyer, Whig leader, poet, Freemason, and Confederate general who championed secession and fought against Black suffrage. During his tenure as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite—a position he held for more than thirty years beginning in 1859—Pike popularized the Masonic movement in the American South and Far West. In the wake of the Civil War, Pike left Arkansas, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C., where he lived out his last years in the Mason's House of the Temple.

Drawing on original documents, Pike’s copious writings, and interviews with Pike’s descendants, Walter Lee Brown presents a fascinating personal history that also serves as a rich compendium of Arkansas’s antebellum history.
 

An unflinching account of Russia's brutal war in Chechnya by a reporter who was assassinated because of her work

Chechnya, a 6,000-square-mile corner of the northern Caucasus, has struggled under Russian domination for centuries. The region declared its independence in 1991, leading to a brutal war, Russian withdrawal, and subsequent "governance" by bandits and warlords. A series of apartment building attacks in Moscow in 1999, allegedly orchestrated by a rebel faction, reignited the war, which continues to rage today. Russia has gone to great lengths to keep journalists from reporting on the conflict; consequently, few people outside the region understand its scale and the atrocities—described by eyewitnesses as comparable to those discovered in Bosnia—committed there.

Anna Politkovskaya, a correspondent for the liberal Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta, was the only journalist to have constant access to the region. Her international stature and reputation for honesty among the Chechens allowed her to continue to report to the world the brutal tactics of Russia's leaders used to quell the uprisings. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is her second book on this bloody and prolonged war. More than a collection of articles and columns, A Small Corner of Hell offers a rare insider's view of life in Chechnya over the past years. Centered on stories of those caught-literally-in the crossfire of the conflict, her book recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it, from the guards who accept bribes from Chechens out after curfew to the United Nations. Politkovskaya's unflinching honesty and her courage in speaking truth to power combine here to produce a powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet.

 

Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow on October 7, 2006.

 

"The murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya leaves a terrible silence in Russia and an information void about a dark realm that we need to know more about. No one else reported as she did on the Russian north Caucasus and the abuse of human rights there. Her reports made for difficult reading—and Politkovskaya only got where she did by being one of life's difficult people."—Thomas de Waal, Guardian

      George E. Stephens, the most
        important African-American war correspondent of his era, served in the
        famed black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, subject of the film Glory.
        His letters from the front, published in the New York Weekly Anglo-African,
        brilliantly detail two wars: one against the Confederacy and one against
        the brutal, debilitating racism within his own Union Army. Together with
        Donald Yacovone's biographical introduction detailing Stephens's life
        and times, they provide a singular perspective on the greatest crisis
        in the history of the United States.
      Stephens chronicled the African-American
        quest for freedom in reports from southern Maryland and eastern Virginia
        in 1861 and 1862 that detailed, among other issues of the day, the Army
        of the Potomac's initial encounter with slavery, the heroism of fugitive
        slaves, and the brutality both Southerners and Union troops inflicted
        on them.
      From the inception of the
        Fifty-fourth early in 1863 Stephens was the unit's voice, telling of its
        struggle against slavery and its quest to win the pay it had been promised.
        His description of the July 18, 1863, assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston,
        South Carolina, and his writings on the unit's eighteen-month campaign
        to be paid as much as white troops are gripping accounts of continued
        heroism in the face of persistent insult.
      The Weekly Anglo-African
        was the preeminent African-American newspaper of its time. Stephens's
        correspondence, intimate and authoritative, takes in an expansive array
        of issues and anticipates nearly all modern assessments of the black role
        in the Civil War. His commentary on the Lincoln administration's wartime
        policy and his conviction that the issues of race and slavery were central
        to nineteenth-century American life mark him as a major American social
        critic.
 

A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period she kept a diary of personal reflections on, and observations of, this historic time. Because of the outspoken views she published in print and online, Yazbek quickly attracted the attention and fury of the regime, vicious rumours started to spread about her disloyalty to the homeland and the Alawite community to which she belongs. The lyrical narrative describes her struggle to protect herself and her young daughter, even as her activism propels her into a horrifying labyrinth of insecurity after she is forced into living on the run and detained multiple times, excluded from the Alawite community and renounced by her family, her hometown and even her childhood friends. With rare empathy and journalistic prowess Samar Yazbek compiled oral testimonies from ordinary Syrians all over the country. Filled with snapshots of exhilarating hope and horrifying atrocities, she offers us a wholly unique perspective on the Syrian uprising. Hers is a modest yet powerful testament to the strength and commitment of countless unnamed Syrians who have united to fight for their freedom. These diaries will inspire all those who read them, and challenge the world to look anew at the trials and tribulations of the Syrian uprising.

For twenty-five years, Charlotte Curtis was a society/women's reporter and editor and an op-ed editor at the New York Times. As the first woman section editor at the Times, Curtis was a pioneering journalist and one of the first nationwide to change the nature and content of the women's pages from fluffy wedding announcements and recipes to the more newsy, issue-oriented stories that characterize them today. In this riveting biography, Marilyn Greenwald describes how a woman reporter from Columbus, Ohio, broke into the ranks of the male-dominated upper echelon at the New York Times. It documents what she did to succeed and what she had to sacrifice.

Charlotte Curtis paved the way for the journalists who followed her. A Woman of the Times offers a chronicle of her hard-won journey as she invents her own brand of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s. In the telling of this remarkable woman’s life is the story, as well, of a critical era in the nation’s social history.

On the American stages of politics and journalism in the mid-nineteenth century, few men were more influential than Abraham Lincoln and his sometime adversary, sometime ally, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. In this compelling new volume, author Gregory A. Borchard explores the intricate relationship between these two vibrant figures, both titans of the press during one of the most tumultuous political eras in American history. Packed with insightful analysis and painstaking research, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley offers a fresh perspective on these luminaries and their legacies.

Borchard begins with an overview of the lives of both Lincoln and Greeley, delving particularly into their mutual belief in Henry Clay’s much-debated American System, and investigating the myriad similarities between the two political giants, including their comparable paths to power and their statuses as self-made men, their reputations as committed reformers, and their shared dedication to social order and developing a national infrastructure. Also detailed are Lincoln’s and Greeley’s personal quests to end slavery in the United States, as well as their staunch support of free-soil homesteads in the West. 

Yet despite their ability to work together productively, both men periodically found themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Their by turns harmonious and antagonistic relationship often played out on the front pages of Greeley’s influential newspaper, the New York Tribune. Drawing upon historical gems from the Tribune, as well as the personal papers of both Lincoln and Greeley, Borchard explores in depth the impact the two men had on their times and on each other, and how, as Lincoln’s and Greeley’s paths often crossed—and sometimes diverged—they personified the complexities, virtues, contradictions, and faults of their eras. 

Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley goes beyond tracing each man’s personal and political evolution to offer a new perspective on the history-changing events of the times, including the decline of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans, the drive to extend American borders into the West; and the bloody years of the Civil War. Borchard finishes with reflections on the deaths of Lincoln and Greeley and how the two men have been remembered by subsequent generations. 

Sure to become an essential volume in the annals of political history and journalism, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley is a compelling testament to the indelible mark these men left on both their contemporaries and the face of America’s future.

In this frank and informative autobiography, the veteran investigative journalist Ida M. Tarbell looks back on her nearly fifty-year career. At the age of eighty-two, one of the original muckrakers writes with her characteristic candor about a life spent defying categories and challenging complacency.
 
Tarbell was the only woman in her class of forty students at Allegheny College, and upon graduation she began an internship at The Chautauquan, which was the start of a lifelong immersion in the world of journalism. She further honed her skills during a three-year stint in Paris, but the breakthrough came in 1894 when she was hired as a full-time writer for McClure's Magazine.
 
It was at McClure's--where, again, she was the only woman on staff--that Tarbell made her name as a determined journalist, one of the fearless brigade of truth-seekers famously chastised by Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term ‘muckraker' in order to discredit those who attacked senators in print. Tarbell wrote serialized biographies of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, as well as a landmark series of articles on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.
 
In All in the Day's Work, Tarbell turns her keen eye on herself, recalling the events of her fascinating life with the same honesty, verve, and scrupulous accuracy she brought to her journalistic work, offering insight along the way into the people, places, and issues of her time.
 

A long-overdue book on the brilliant life and career of one of our greatest public intellectuals, American Prophet will introduce Carey McWilliams to a new generation of readers.

Peter Richardson's absorbing and elegantly paced book reveals a figure thoroughly engaged with the issues of his time. Deftly interweaving correspondence, diary notes, published writings, and McWilliams's own and others' observations on a colorful and influential cast of characters from Hollywood, New York, Washington, DC, and the American West, Richardson maps the evolution of McWilliams's personal and professional life. Among those making an appearance are H. L. Mencken (McWilliams's mentor and role model), Louis Adamic, John Fante, Robert Towne, Richard Nixon, Studs Terkel, J. Edgar Hoover, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Joseph McCarthy.

American Prophet illustrates the arc of McWilliams's life and career from his early literary journalism through his legal and political activism, his stint in state government, and his two decades as editor of the Nation. This book makes the case for McWilliams's place in the Olympian realm of our most influential and prescient political writers.

Peter Richardson is the editorial director at PoliPointPress in Sausalito, California. He is the author or editor of numerous works on language, literature, and California public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California Berkeley.

Popular Front columnist and New Deal propagandist, fearless opponent of McCarthyism and feared scourge of official liars, I. F. Stone (1907–1989)—magnetic, witty, indefatigable—left a permanent mark on our politics and culture. A college dropout, he was already an influential newsman by the age of twenty-five, enjoying extraordinary access to key figures in Washington and New York. Guttenplan finds the key to Stone’s achievements throughout his singular career—not just in the celebrated I. F. Stone’s Weekly—lay in the force and passion of his political commitments. Stone’s calm and forensic yet devastating reports on American politics and institutions sprang from a radical faith in the long-term prospects for American democracy. 

In an era when the old radical questions—about war, the economy, health care, and the right to dissent—are suddenly new again, Guttenplan’s lively, provocative book makes clear why so many of Stone’s pronouncements have acquired the force of prophecy.

Arthur Bonner, a New York Times reporter with long experience as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, spent most of 1985 and 1986 in Afghanistan and Pakistan researching the aftermath of the 1979 Soviet invasion of this mountainous, fiercely Islamic country. Bonner made another trip to Pakistan in mid-1987 to test his conclusions against recent events.
Bonner therefore brings both recent experience and the sharp eye of a veteran journalist to an analysis of the Afghan situation: the tenacity and courage of the resistance, the massive emmigration, and the toll taken by the seemingly endless conflict on the country and its people.
The author has seen both the great and small of Afghanistan--both the seared flesh of the hand that an Afghan mujahidin held in the fire to demonstrate his courage and the geopolitical reasons that impelled the former Soviet Union of set its might and treasure against a people who resisted with a fierce and sometimes (to Western eyes) thoughtless courage. This is the story of these antagonists--sobering, chilling, and finally enlightening.

   When an idealistic American named Edmund Stevens arrived in Moscow in 1934, his only goal was to do his part for the advancement of international Communism. His job writing propaganda led to a reporting career and an eventual Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his uncensored descriptions of Stalin’s purges. This book tells how Stevens became an accidental journalist—and the dean of the Moscow press corps.

            The longest-serving American-born correspondent working from within the Soviet Union, Stevens was passionate about influencing the way his stateside readers thought about Russia’s citizens, government, and social policy. Cheryl Heckler now traces a career that spanned half a century and four continents, focusing on Stevens’s professional work and life from 1934 to 1945 to tell how he set the standards for reporting on Soviet affairs for the Christian Science Monitor.

            Stevens was a keen observer and thoughtful commentator, and his analytical mind was just what the Monitor was looking for in a foreign correspondent. He began his journalism career reporting on the Russo-Finnish War in 1939 and was the Monitor’s first man in the field to cover fighting in World War II. He reported on the Italian invasion of Greece, participated in Churchill’s Moscow meeting with Stalin as a staff translator, and distinguished himself as a correspondent with the British army in North Africa.

Drawing on Stevens’s memoirs—to which she had exclusive access—as well as his articles and correspondence and the unpublished memoirs of his wife, Nina, Heckler traces his growth as a frontline correspondent and interpreter of Russian culture. She paints a picture of a man hardened by experience, who witnessed the brutal crushing of the Iron Guard in 1941 Bucharest and the Kharkov hangings yet who was a failure on his own home front and who left his wife during a difficult pregnancy in order to return to the war zone. Heckler places his memoirs and dispatches within the larger context of events to shed new light on both the public and the private Stevens, portraying a reporter adapting to new roles and circumstances with a skill that journalists today could well emulate.

By exposing the many facets of Stevens’s life and experience, Heckler gives readers a clear understanding of how this accidental journalist was destined to distinguish himself as a war reporter, analyst, and cultural interpreter. An Accidental Journalist is an important contribution to the history of war reporting and international journalism, introducing readers to a man whose inside knowledge of Stalinist Russia was beyond compare as it provides new insight into the Soviet era.

As American journalism shape-shifts into multimedia pandemonium and seems to diminish rapidly in influence and integrity, the controversial career of H. L. Mencken, the most powerful individual journalist of the twentieth century, is a critical text for anyone concerned with the balance of power between the free press, the government, and the corporate plutocracy. Mencken, the belligerent newspaperman from Baltimore, was not only the most outspoken pundit of his day but also, by far, the most widely read, and according to many critics the most gifted American writer ever nurtured in a newsroom—a vanished world of typewriter banks and copy desks that electronic advances have precipitously erased.

Nearly 60 years after his death, Mencken’s memory and monumental verbal legacy rest largely in the hands of literary scholars and historians, to whom he will always be a curious figure, unchecked and alien and not a little distasteful. No faculty would have voted him tenure. Hal Crowther, who followed in many of Mencken’s footsteps as a reporter, magazine editor, literary critic, and political columnist, focuses on Mencken the creator, the observer who turned his impressions and prejudices into an inimitable group portrait of America, painted in prose that charms and glowers and endures. Crowther, himself a working polemicist who was awarded the Baltimore Sun’s Mencken prize for truculent commentary, examines the origin of Mencken’s thunderbolts—where and how they were manufactured, rather than where and on whom they landed.

Mencken was such an outrageous original that contemporary writers have made him a political shuttlecock, defaming or defending him according to modern conventions he never encountered. Crowther argues that loving or hating him, admiring or despising him are scarcely relevant. Mencken can inspire and he can appall. The point is that he mattered, at one time enormously, and had a lasting effect on the national conversation. No writer can afford to ignore his craftsmanship or success, or fail to be fascinated by his strange mind and the world that produced it. This book is a tribute—though by no means a loving one—to a giant from one of his bastard sons.

In 1905, with her marriage dissolved and desperate to find a way to feed her children, Angela Hutchinson Hammer bought a handpress, some ink, and a few fonts of type, and began printing a little tabloid called the Wickenburg Miner. In her naïveté, Angela never dreamed this purchase would place her squarely in the forefront of power struggles during Arizona's early days of statehood.

A true daughter of the West, Angela, born in a tiny mining hamlet in Nevada, came to the Territory of Arizona at the age of twelve. Betty Hammer Joy weaves together the lively story of her grandmother's life by drawing upon Angela's own prodigious writing and correspondence, newspaper archives, and the recollections of family members. Her book recounts the stories Angela told of growing up in mining camps, teaching in territorial schools, courtship, marriage, and a twenty-eight-year career in publishing and printing. During this time, Angela managed to raise three sons, run for public office before women in the nation had the right to vote, serve as Immigration Commissioner in Pinal County, homestead, and mature into an activist for populist agendas and water conservation. As questionable deals took place both within and outside the halls of government, the crusading Angela encountered many duplicitous characters who believed that women belonged at home darning socks, not running a newspaper.

Although Angela's independent papers brought personal hardship and little if any financial reward, after her death in 1952 the newspaper industry paid tribute to this courageous woman by selecting her as the first woman to enter the Arizona Newspaper Hall of Fame. In 1983 she was honored posthumously with another award for women who contributed to Arizona's progress—induction into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.