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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.

Written by three veteran interpreters with deep roots in the Deaf community and the performing arts, Sign Language Interpreting for Theatre is the first of its kind: a comprehensive guide to the art of sign language interpreting for the theatre as a collaborative practice. Drawing from their years of experience of interpreting On- and Off-Broadway and blending the theoretical with the practical, Lynnette Taylor, Stephanie Feyne, and Candace Broecker Penn provide guiding principles, best practices, processes, and strategies for creating dynamic, collaborative, culturally grounded sign language translations for theatre performances. Written in an engaging, conversational style, chapters include in-depth discussion of both theory and practice, providing techniques for translation and stagecraft along with practical insights for issues such as interpreting team attributes, character depiction, working with scripts, song translations, interpreting for young audiences, and interpreting virtual and recorded performances. With its emphasis upon dialogic interpretation, shared responsibility, and alliances, this guide is an indispensable resource for interpreters, educators, and theatre professionals.

Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.

Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

Signed Languages: Discoveries from International Research collects the thirteen freshest, most innovative papers presented at the sixth Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research conference in 1998, the largest of its kind ever convened. Presented together in this timely compendium, the research reflects the current trend toward focusing on international signed languages that previously have been ignored, including those of Sweden, Israel, Venezuela, and northern Nigeria.

The anthology is divided into six sections: Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, and Poetics. In Part One, articulatory constraints and the sign language of the Netherlands are addressed. In Part Two, researchers tackle noun classifiers, nonhanded signs, and verb classes in the signed languages of Sweden, the United States, and Israel respectively. Part Three offers the study, "Functional Consequences of Modality: Spatial Coding in Working Memory for Signs."

Language acquisition is analyzed in both adult learners and deaf children in Part Four. Part Five reports on the relationship between language and society around the world, focusing particularly on the signed languages of Venezuela and northern Nigeria. Part Six considers the techniques employed in British Sign Language poetry and ASL poetry.

A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages.
 
Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, defines, and creates a field for working out social relations. Because this field of study in sociolinguistics historically has focused on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on references to the addressee—for example, the choice between tu and vous when addressing someone in French. This book uses the study of Southeast Asian languages to theorize interlocutor reference more broadly, significantly deepening our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. As the authors explain, Southeast Asian systems exceed in complexity and nuance the well-described cases of Europe in two basic ways. First, in many languages of Southeast Asia, a speaker must select an appropriate reference form not only for other/addressee but also for self/speaker. Second, in these languages, in addition to pronouns, speakers draw upon a range of common and proper nouns including names, kin terms, and titles, in referring to themselves and the addressee. Acts of interlocutor reference, therefore, inevitably do more than simply identify the speaker and addressee; they also convey information about the proposed relation between interlocutors. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanized communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this is an important contribution to the regional linguistic and anthropological literature.
 

Sites of Writing builds upon the multiple contributions of Anne Ruggles Gere across a long and highly productive career. The chapters in this edited collection, written by leading scholars (including some of Gere’s former students) to track her major contributions to writing studies, situate those contributions within the broader landscape of field development, and draw on those findings to assess important trends and project productive pathways for the future. The contributors to the collection consider disciplinary history, language and literacy, writing across the curriculum, digital rhetoric, writing’s extracurriculum, assessment, and English education, among other areas. Connecting these multiple fields of activity, Sites of Writing affirms Gere’s view of writing as a powerful social and cultural activity and of literacy, broadly conceived, as enabling cultural transformations and, in the process, transforming writing studies and other fields.

Yancey and Weiser bring together thirty-one writing teachers from diverse levels of instruction, institutional settings, and regions to create a stimulating volume on the current practice in portfolio writing assessment. Contributors reflect on the explosion in portfolio practice over the last decade, why it happened, what comes next; discuss portfolios in hypertext, the web, and other electronic spaces; and consider emerging trends and issues that are involving portfolios in teacher assessment, faculty development, and graduate student experience.

Contributors: Peter Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, Brian Huot, Sandra Murphy, William Condon