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Newspaper Reference Methods was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

At the turn of the twentieth century, ambitious publishers like Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert McCormick produced the most spectacular newspapers Americans had ever read.  Alongside current events and classified ads, publishers began running comic strips, sports sections, women’s pages, and Sunday magazines. Newspapers’ lavish illustrations, colorful dialogue, and sensational stories seemed to reproduce city life on the page. 

Yet as Julia Guarneri reveals, newspapers did not simply report on cities; they also helped to build them.  Metropolitan sections and civic campaigns crafted cohesive identities for sprawling metropolises.  Real estate sections boosted the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities’ roles as economic and information hubs.  Advice columns and advertisements helped assimilate migrants and immigrants to a class-conscious, consumerist, and cosmopolitan urban culture.

Newsprint Metropolis offers a tour of American newspapers in their most creative and vital decades.  It traces newspapers’ evolution into highly commercial, mass-produced media, and assesses what was gained and lost as national syndicates began providing more of Americans’ news.  Case studies of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee illuminate the intertwined histories of newspapers and the cities they served.  In an era when the American press is under attack, Newsprint Metropolis reminds us how papers once hosted public conversations and nurtured collective identities in cities across America. 

In July 1973, for the first time in its history, the New York Times Magazine devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas’s account of the Watergate story to date. Six months later, a second installment ran in another full issue. Later the Times asked him to write a third issue, on the impeachment, which never appeared because of Nixon’s intervening resignation. But all of Lukas’s painstaking reporting on Nixon’s last months in office appears here, along with added information on every aspect of Watergate.

Widely acclaimed as a major text of the Watergate saga, J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare is a masterwork of investigation, highlighted by in-depth character sketches of the key players. For students of history coming to these events for the first time, this book reveals in depth the particular trauma of a nation in turmoil; for those who remember, the upheaval and what was at stake are once more brought to life.

Johnson argues that nineteenth-century rhetoric was primarily synthetic, derived from the combination of classical elements and eighteenth-century belletristic and epistemological approaches to theory and practice. She reveals that nineteenth-century rhetoric supported several rhetorical arts, each conceived systematically from a similar theoretical foundation.

In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center.

Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.

Norman Corwin is regarded as the most acclaimed creative artist of radio’s Golden Age (mid 1930s to late 1940s). Corwin worked as a producer for CBS at a time when radio was the centerpiece of American family life. His programs brought high moments to the medium during a period when exceptional creativity and world crisis shaped its character and conviction. Bannerman’s book is more than biography: it is also social history—the story of network radio, its great achievements and ultimate decline. Many of Corwin’s programs are considered radio classics. During World War II his programs energized the people and marshaled morale. We Hold These Truths, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the American Bill of Rights, was broadcast eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and On a Note of Triumph, a VE-Day special for CBS, marked the historic culmination of a momentous conflict. Bannerman’s work is a portrayal of a remarkable man, who led an influential fight for the art and integrity of broadcasting, who endured unfounded accusations during the blacklisting period of the McCarthy era, and who by his dedication accomplished significant programs of historic dimensions.

Honorable Mention, 2024 NCA Public Address Division’s Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award
Honorable Mention, 2025 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine Book Award

While research demonstrates how Indigenous populations have been disproportionately affected by the global nuclear production complex, less attention has been given to tactics that have successfully resisted such projects. Danielle Endres’s Nuclear Decolonization shifts the conversation around nuclear colonialism in important ways, offering an account of how the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Skull Valley Goshute peoples and nations prevented two high-level nuclear waste sites from being built on their lands.

Using a decolonial approach, Endres highlights two sets of rhetorical tactics—Indigenous Lands rhetorics and national interest rhetorics—used to fight nuclear colonialism. The book reframes nuclear decolonization as fundamentally a struggle for the return of Indigenous lands while also revealing how Native activists selectively move between Indigenous nationhood and US citizenship in order to resist settler decision-making. Working at the intersection of Indigenous antinuclear advocacy, Indigenized environmental justice, and decolonization, Nuclear Decolonization centers Native activism and voices while amplifying the power and resilience of Indigenous peoples and nations.