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A history of courage and collective action inside the most powerful newsrooms in America

In 1971, Susan Smith, a young researcher at Reader’s Digest, dared to imagine herself as an editor. Her ambition was swiftly dismissed by a hiring manager who told her, “Single girls just don’t do well in this job.” Crushed—and then furious—Smith sought out Harriet Rabb, the attorney who had successfully sued Newsweek for sex discrimination just a year earlier. Their meeting helped spark a class-action lawsuit that ultimately united two thousand women at the magazine and became part of a broader revolt inside American newsrooms. Smith’s experience was far from unique. For much of American history, journalism has been rigidly segregated by gender, with women confined to research, clerical work, or the “women’s pages,” while men dominated reporting, editing, and leadership. That system began to crack in the 1970s, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the women’s liberation movement emboldened newswomen to challenge daily discrimination. Yet this development has remained largely hidden, buried by editors reluctant to document inequities within their own institutions. Settling recovers this lost story.

Tracing class-action sex discrimination lawsuits at some of the most powerful news organizations in the United States—including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Time—Ashley Walter draws on oral histories and long-forgotten documents to reconstruct legal battles at eight major outlets. She argues that meaningful change came not from institutional goodwill but from the courage of women who organized, testified, and risked their careers to demand equality. Their victories reshaped journalism itself. As women assumed reporting and editorial roles, they broadened the scope of who counted as newsworthy, covering women as workers, political leaders, and authoritative sources. With this new illumination of women’s full participation in public life, newswomen shifted social norms and helped build women’s power across American society. By recovering these accounts, Settling reveals how newsroom struggles for gender equality transformed both journalism and the nation, offering urgent lessons for our present moment.

Historians of journalism and mass media have tended to focus on journalism and news – its people and content – while neglecting the field’s broader and interconnected roles in United States history. Shadow Press: The Myth and Making of Independent Journalism explores how the extreme edges of reporting challenged and reshaped American journalism for over a century, from 1890 to 1980. 

What a reporter is and does, and does not do, and the integrity of that idea, has always been an unsettled question, interrogated on the borders between journalism and the state. There, from battlefields in Cuba, revolution in Mexico, presidential politics in Washington, D.C., and world wars in Europe, reporters – formally and informally, officially and unofficially, openly and secretly – served the state. This book explains how and why reporters, amidst the allure of patriotism, prestige, and power, came to work for the state, and then stopped, culminating with the historically aberrant ascent of modern independent journalism. 

To reclaim that history, Shadow Press spotlights famous, infamous, or previously unknown reporters whose careers reflected the usually submerged question of press-state collaboration and revealed wider changes within journalism. Part I documents how reporters traveled multiple routes into the state, including U.S. empire (the War of 1898), the Mexican Revolution, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the domestic reform efforts of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and World War II. Part II documents how, during the Cold War, reporters, embedded within the state, separated to redefine journalism, and lobbied to establish in 1980 the uneasy policies of today that narrowly permit the CIA and FBI to impersonate reporters.

Shadow Press provides accessible plots and character-driven narrative arcs for general readers interested in American history. Moreover, journalism critics will take an interest in how the history provided in Shadow Press informs the debate over how best to do journalism today. During the last two decades, a historical caricature of news objectivity has emerged, a rigid model of amoral methodology and unacknowledged personal subjectivity that still lingers. That caricature has concealed the political activism of the self-declared objective press. Today’s “objectivity war” in journalism is a memory war. As a result, the debate about how best to cover the Republication Party, Donald Trump, and far right movements is based on a broad misunderstanding of how journalism functioned in US democracy. Combining expansive and rigorous archival investigation with the dramatic requirements of a good story, Shadow Press provides a new line of scholarly inquiry to expand the scope of journalism within US political history.

From a behind-the-scenes perspective, David Witwer describes how Pegler and his publisher, the politically powerful Roy W. Howard, shaped the news coverage of this scandal in ways that obscured the corrupt ties between employers and the mob while emphasizing the perceived menace of union leaders empowered by New Deal legislation that had legitimized organized labor. Pegler, Howard, and the rest of the mainstream press pointedly ignored evidence of the active role that business leaders took in the corruption, which badly tarnished the newly reborn labor movement.

Because he was more concerned with pursuing political gains for the conservative movement, Pegler's investigative journalism did little to reform union governance or organized crime's influence on labor unions. The union corruption scandal only undercut the labor movement. Pegler's continuing campaign against labor corruption framed the issue in ways that set the stage for postwar political defeats, culminating with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which greatly limited the power of labor unions in the United States.

Demonstrating clearly and convincingly how journalism is wielded as a political weapon, Witwer studies a broad range of forces at play in the labor union scandal and its impact, including the influence of the press, organized crime, political corruption, and businessmen following their own economic imperatives.

The late James M. Cain was a newspaperman, playwright, and novelist. Although best known for his controversial novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Serenade, The Butterfly, and Past All Dishonor), Cain always considered himself a journalist, a "newpaperman who wrote yarns on the side." The book includes some of Cain's best articles and essays. The material is sometimes serious, sometimes humorous and provides a unique look at 60 years of history.

A road trip through Steinbeck’s America—revisited, reimagined, and reinterpreted.

Steinbeck’s Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck’s best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America’s troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife’s standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales.

Throughout this narrative, Steinbeck insists that all of our perceptions are “warped” by personality, history, and society. And while this hybrid and experimental book has long been accepted as an accurate account of his journey, journalists and scholars agree that the narrative is part factual, part fiction—America as seen through Steinbeck’s particular “warp.” The work is long overdue for scholarly assessment.

Steinbeck’s Uneasy America explores three main topics. Part 1 explores genre and form to consider the degree to which the work is fiction or nonfiction. Part 2 assesses Steinbeck’s increasingly bleak assessment of America—almost a jeremiad that warns citizens of ecological excess and political apathy. Part 3 focuses on Travels with Charley as a road text, travel adventure, and literary influence.

This volume’s authors offer rich scholarly insights and a wealth of stories, facts, and anecdotes about Steinbeck and the adventures and misadventures he and Charley met on the road. Lively and groundbreaking, the collection both enlightens and enlivens discussions of Steinbeck and of the twentieth-century American book world.