Results by title

Winner of the 2025 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award

Winner of the 2025 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)'s Tankard Book Award and the AEJMC's History Division Book Award

When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.

Reimagining transparency and secrecy in the era of digital data

When total data surveillance delimits agency and revelations of political wrongdoing fail to have consequences, is transparency the social panacea liberal democracies purport it to be? This book sets forth the provocative argument that progressive social goals would be better served by a radical form of secrecy, at least while state and corporate forces hold an asymmetrical advantage over the less powerful in data control. Clare Birchall asks: How might transparency actually serve agendas that are far from transparent? Can we imagine a secrecy that could act in the service of, rather than against, a progressive politics? 

To move beyond atomizing calls for privacy and to interrupt the perennial tension between state security and the public’s right to know, Birchall adapts Édouard Glissant’s thinking to propose a digital “right to opacity.” As a crucial element of radical secrecy, she argues, this would eventually give rise to a “postsecret” society, offering an understanding and experience of the political that is free from the false choice between secrecy and transparency. She grounds her arresting story in case studies including the varied presidential styles of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump; the Snowden revelations; conspiracy theories espoused or endorsed by Trump; WikiLeaks and guerrilla transparency; and the opening of the state through data portals.

Postsecrecy is the necessary condition for imagining, finally, an alternative vision of “the good,” of equality, as neither shaped by neoliberal incarnations of transparency nor undermined by secret state surveillance. Not least, postsecrecy reimagines collective resistance in the era of digital data.

The traditional radio medium has seen significant changes in recent years as part of the current global shift toward multimedia content, with both digital and FM making significant use of new technologies, including mobile communications and the Internet. This book focuses on the important role these new technologies play—and will play as radio continues to evolve. This series of essays by top academics in the field examines new options for radio technology as well as a summary of the opportunities and challenges that characterize academic and professional debates around radio today.

2026 Gold Medal for the Best Women's Issues Book, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH)
How Latina voices in commercial radio and podcasting subvert cultural norms and bring feminism to the fore of their work.

What does Latina feminism sound like in popular culture? Drawing on case studies of commercial radio programs and podcasts hosted by Latinas and oriented toward Latinx listenership, Esther Díaz Martín explores how Latina voices create female-specific aural spaces that interrupt the misogynist status quo in US mainstream media.

Radiophonic Feminisms focuses on radio/podcasting as a medium in which women find methods for resisting oppressive gendered cultural imaginaries. Through their specific articulations—that is, the quality of their voices—their music choices, and the soundscapes they construct, Latina hosts since the early 1990s have offered feminist responses to a cultural moment marked by the demographic changes brought on by the political economy of migration and the social changes wrought by media in the digital age. Drawing attention to the invisible antisexist work of creating sound, and to its reception, Díaz Martín bridges the epistemic insights of Chicana feminist theory and sound studies, enriching and further decolonizing our thinking about auditory meaning making.

From Hollywood blockbusters to art films, distributors play an important role in getting films in front of audiences and thus in shaping the nature of film culture. Of central concern to Reaching Audiences are the distribution practices developed to counter Hollywood’s dominance of the marketplace, designed to ensure audiences have access to a more diverse moving image culture. Through a series of case studies, the book tracks the inventive distribution and exhibition initiatives developed over the last forty years by small companies on the periphery of the United Kingdom’s film industry—practices now being replicated by a new generation of digital distributors. Although largely invisible to outsiders, the importance of distribution networks is widely recognized in the industry, and this book is a key contribution to our understanding of the role they play.

This collection takes as its point of departure the proposition that one can, in fact, tell a book by its cover. The contributors examine the ways in which the material qualities of books—including typography, paper, bindings, layout , and promotional copy—as well as their editing, production, and distribution profoundly affect how they have been read and understood. 

The volume includes essays on the publishing history of Melville's early novels, Twain's The Innocents Abroad, the Tauchnitz edition of Hawthornes's The Marble Faun, and Jackson's Romona. Other chapters examine the reception of Dante's works in America, Houghton Mifflin's biographical series, the binding styles of Ticknor and Fields, and the packaging of literature for American high schools.

Exploring the books and reading practices behind the creation of Transcendentalist philosophy and community

Transcendentalism emerged in early 19th century New England as a uniquely American philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement. Its first generation of thinkers—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Margaret Fuller—created a worldview that stressed the inherent goodness of the “self-reliant” individual and the presence of the divine in nature. These intellectuals gathered in informal symposia devoted to what Emerson called “creative reading,” a practice that stresses the transformative potential of the written word that was central to the movement’s emergence, growth, and spread. But what were these thinkers reading and how did it influence the development of Transcendentalism?

In Reading with the Transcendentalists, renowned literary scholar Philip F. Gura focuses on 10 American, British, and European books that were essential to the movement’s thoughts, writings, and activities. Many of the authors of these books—James Marsh, Madame de Staël, Samson Reed, George Ripley, Thomas Carlyle, Albert Brisbane, and George Sand—stood outside of Transcendentalism yet profoundly influenced it. Others such as Emerson, Parker, and Fuller were the movement’s central architects, whose writings in turn inspired the next generation, including Henry David Thoreau and Caroline Healey Dall. Each of these books challenged prevailing religious, philosophical, and social conventions in ways that resonated deeply with burgeoning Transcendentalist ideals.

Blending intellectual biography with book history, Gura crafts a captivating cultural history that reconstructs the dynamic social networks of the early Transcendentalists, in which ideas from the written word circulated, evolved, and acquired new meanings. The result is an rich portrait of reading as a creative and communal act, and an exploration of how books ignite curiosity, sustain friendship, and catalyze intellectual transformation. Through a carefully developed narrative structure that is filled not only with books and reading but with headline-worthy scandals, disputes, and falling outs and realignments, Gura traces the historical arc of a transnational intellectual movement that helped lay the foundation for the idea of “America.”

For over a century, National Geographic has shaped American visual culture, captivating audiences with stunning photography and compelling storytelling. Yet behind its iconic yellow border lies a fraught legacy of gender bias, racial misrepresentation, and colonialist narratives.In this incisive study, Leland G. Spencer examines the brand's recent attempts to reckon with that legacy across its magazine and television platforms. From special issues spotlighting transgender lives, to a public acknowledgment of past racism, to a magazine edition created entirely by women, these efforts signal a move toward inclusivity. But as Spencer reveals through rigorous rhetorical analysis, these gestures often fall short. The texts themselves frequently echo the same systemic inequalities they seek to redress. National Geographic's progressive rebranding, he argues, remains tangled in the very histories it aims to transcend.
 

Constructing a disability history of reading through the embossed books that shaped and constrained it

When the Maryland Institution for the Instruction of the Blind opened in 1853, its charter defined blindness as the inability to read ink. Embedded in that same document was a small rectangle of embossed roman letters—a “specimen of printing” that encapsulated decades of experimentation and a central contradiction: that a form of print designed to liberate visually impaired readers also asked them to read like sighted ones.

In Recovering Touch, Amanda Stuckey traces raised print developments from the first embossed book in the United States—the Gospel of St. Mark, embossed in 1833—through the late nineteenth-century War of the Dots, the contested debates among educators and administrators over which type system visually impaired readers should use. Focusing predominantly on raised roman letter systems, Stuckey brings visually impaired readers into nineteenth-century histories of reading, connecting individual acts of touch-based reading to broader histories of disability, schooling, and print culture. Embossed books promised to open the world of the printed word to readers marginalized from inked text. Yet educators often deployed these materials as tools to assimilate visually impaired students into the reading, learning, and labor standards of the sighted world.

Recovering Touch constructs a disability history of reading that centers the material conditions of touch-based reading: the paper that had to be felt rather than seen, the types that dulled over time, and the readers who adapted, repurposed, and at times defied the assimilationist expectations built into the books beneath their fingertips.

Reel Inequality was the first book to systematically document how Hollywood's institutional racism shapes the lives and careers of actors of color. In this updated edition, Nancy Wang Yuen again translates academic research on structural racism into an engaging, accessible narrative for general readers. Connecting personal stories from actors of color, industry data and practices, and historical patterns, she reveals how racism operates both behind the scenes and on the screen. She also examines Hollywood’s retreat from diversity efforts amid the broader backlash against DEI. 

Yuen draws on newly released industry data and recently published interviews with actors of color, showing how racism continues to shape who gets cast, who gets hired, and who gets to tell their own story. She looks closely at the pressures actors of color face, including typecasting, financial precarity, and racial burdens, even as many push back and forge their own paths. She also uses the lens of Hollywood to explore broader issues of race, inequality, and representation.

There exists today a tragic rift between Americans and the world’s Muslims. Yet in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was widespread sympathy for the U.S. throughout the Muslim world. This book explores what happened. It examines the disconnect that leads Americans and Muslims to view the same words and images in fundamentally different ways. Partly a result of a centuries-old 'us' against 'them' dichotomy, the problem is exacerbated by an increasingly polarised media and by leaders on both sides who either don't understand or don't care what impact their words and policies have in the world at large.

Journalist-scholar Lawrence Pintak, a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, argues that the Arab media revolution and the rise of 'patriot-journalists' in the US marginalized voices of moderation, distorting perceptions on both sides of the divide with potentially disastrous results.

Built on the author's extensive journalistic experience, the book will appeal to policymakers, students of media studies, Middle East studies and Islamic studies, and general current affairs readers.

HGTV has perfected stories about creating and capturing value in the housing market. But according to Robert Goldman, this lifestyle network’s beloved flagship programs, Flip or Flop, Property Brothers, and Fixer Upper—where people revitalize modern spaces and reinvent property values—offer “fairy tales” in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. The cable channel’s seductive, bingeable programs may show how to find and extract value from properties, but, in fact, they insidiously ignore the realities of the real estate and mortgage markets, housing inequality, gentrification, economic insecurity, and even homelessness. In effect, HGTV has turned house flipping into a master narrative about getting ahead in America during an era of otherwise uneasy economic prospects.

HGTV pictures its insular moral economy as an alternative to a crisis-ridden neoliberal finance system that shaped landscapes of foreclosure and financial uncertainty for millions of households. Renovating Value explores the circuitry of consumer credit and debt, and a rent-gap model of gentrification that charts a path to the rehabilitation of Value. Goldman shrewdly critiques the aspirational myth of adding value to a home simply by using imagination, elbow grease, and aesthetic know-how.