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In the late nineteenth century, a thriving immigrant population supported three German-language weekly newspapers in Arkansas. Most traces of the community those newspapers served disappeared with assimilation in the ensuing decades—but luckily, the complete run of one of the weeklies, Das Arkansas Echo, still exists, offering a lively picture of what life was like for this German immigrant community.

“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South examines topics the newspaper covered during its inaugural year. Kathleen Condray illuminates the newspaper’s crusade against Prohibition, its advocacy for the protection of German schools and the German language, and its promotion of immigration. We also learn about aspects of daily living, including food preparation and preservation, religion, recreation, the role of women in the family and society, health and wellness, and practical housekeeping. And we see how the paper assisted German speakers in navigating civic life outside their immigrant community, including the racial tensions of the post-Reconstruction South.

“Das Arkansas Echo”: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South offers a fresh perspective on the German speakers who settled in a modernizing Arkansas. Mining a valuable newspaper archive, Condray sheds light on how these immigrants navigated their new identity as southern Americans.
 

In Deadline: 200 Years of Violence against Journalists in the United States, Elizabeth Atwood offers the first comprehensive look at the history of fatal attacks against journalists in the United States between 1829 and the present. Atwood describes the political, technological, and economic context of these assaults, and includes brief biographies of the victims and accounts of what happened both them and to their assailants after the attacks.
 
To help us understand these attacks, Atwood presents a framework for categorizing them, built on John Nerone’s studies on assaults on American media workers. Atwood categorizes attacks against journalists as attacks against individuals, ideas, and media institutions, and undertaken to suppress reporting on certain topics and in the context of wars and other international or conflicts. Crucially, Deadline utilizes this framework to offer possible solutions to the issue of violence against journalists.
 
Atwood was inspired to explore the pressing issue of violence against American journalists after the tragic death of one of her colleagues at the Baltimore Sun, Rob Hiaasen, in the Capital Gazette shooting in 2018. Throughout, she demonstrates that distrust of the media and violence against the press in the United States are hardly new developments. Her work examines how intimidation, violence, and censorship have, in fact, been used against the American press since both its and the nation’s founding.
 

Deception in High Places reveals the corruption endemic in Britain's biggest arms deals over the last fifty years.

Based on painstaking research in government archives, collections of private and court papers and documents won by the author in a landmark Freedom of Information Tribunal against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the book illuminates a shadow world of bribery and elite enrichment.

Deception in High Places charts British government involvement in arms trade corruption and presents the fullest history yet of bribery in Britain’s arms deals with Saudi Arabia. It includes the backstory of the controversial termination of a Serious Fraud Office corruption investigation following pressure by the Saudi Royal Family and the British establishment.

Since the Founding, America’s faith in a democratic republic has depended on citizens who could be trusted to be communicators. Vigorous talk about equality, rights, and collaboration fueled the revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution with its amendments. In a republic, the people set the terms for their lives not individually, but in community. The genius of keeping it alive exists in how everyday citizens talk and listen, write and read, for a common good. Dialogue and deliberation—rather than an accumulation of individual preferences—sustains a republic, yet a diminished and scarred institution of journalism jeopardizes citizens’ access to shared and truthful information. A disturbing “what’s in it for me?” attitude has taken over many citizens, and a creeping, autocratic sense of dismissive accusation too often characterizes the political style of elected officials.

The basic fuel for democracy is the willingness of informed citizens to take each other seriously as they talk about political choices. Once we begin to clam up, build walls, and dismiss each other, we unravel the threads tying us to the Founders’ vision of a republic. A free press and free speech become meaningless if not supported by sustained listening to multiple positions. There are those who profit by dividing citizens into two camps: a comfortable “us” versus a scary “them.” They make their case with accusations and often with lies. They warp the very meaning of communication, hoping citizens never truly discover each other’s humanity. Democracy’s News discusses today’s problems of public communication in the context of history, law, and interpersonal life. News should not be something to dread, mistrust, or shun. Aided by reliable, factual journalism, citizens can develop a community-based knowledge to cope with social issues great and small. They come to treat neighbors and strangers as more than stereotypes or opponents. They become collaborators with whom to identify and sustain a working republic where news, citizenship, and public discourse merge.

The devastation of local news organizations has left rural areas of the US marooned in information deserts. Nick Mathews offers a boots-on-the-ground examination of the human toll of local news’s erosion by the winds of de-localization and corporate indifference.

It is no secret that ownership transfers, corporate mergers, and hedge fund takeovers have relentlessly consolidated and closed local news organizations. Mathews exposes the impact of that process on journalism, journalists, and news consumers hungry for outlets that tell their stories. A fundamental breakdown within journalism itself, the abandonment of community news has left disgruntled and disconnected locals to piece together news and information themselves. Mathews draws on the personal experiences of news gatherers and consumers to illuminate why local news cannot be scaled. Mass-produced content inevitably severs ties to communities while distant ownership is indifferent to local concerns.

Nuanced and sympathetic, <i>Deserted</i> provides a vivid portrait of the people and places forsaken by journalism’s corporate owners.

New study provides an overview of the consequences of a platform-dependent press.

Platform dependence is a concept that is used to describe what happens when businesses or an entire sector become reliant on one or more digital platforms for their survival. Digital Platforms and the Press argues that we face a major risk of a platform-dependent press—a development that threatens liberal democracies across the world. As James Meese shows, the situation is occurring across the news industry, to the extent that it is difficult to imagine the production, distribution, and long-term survival of news in liberal democracies without the involvement of platforms. As governments, regulators, and citizens become increasingly concerned about platform power, Digital Platforms and the Press is the first book to highlight the long-term economic and social consequences of platform dependence for the news sector. 
 

This book provides case studies on the strategies used by African governments in monitoring and controlling digital and social media, as well as the implications of such actions for claims about media freedom and freedom of expression.

Further, the book examines the human rights challenges posed by state control and monitoring of digital and social media forms of communication. In the context of a digital surveillance state, it questions how digital and social media can possibly enhance the democratisation of both the communicative and political spaces.

The book focuses on questions of censorship and control of digital and social media in ‘supposedly’ democratic societies. It discusses regulation and how governments have imposed their state power by ‘switching off’ the internet and blocking social media sites under the guise of national security and order maintenance.

In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”
            Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition.