Yet, what these critics see as a troubling new phenomenon has a very long history in this country in reality. Historically, the proliferation of the press and the establishment of political parties were intimately intertwined. Each was necessary to the establishment and development of the other. Beginning around 1800, newspapers enabled incipient political parties to reach a national audience and recruit loyal voters, ensuring the organizations’ long-term survival. For their part, newspapers benefited from subsidies from political parties to publish campaign information and literature and from an expanded readership that devoured political news. Still, this mutually beneficial relationship did not always sit well with people. The well-known social reformer and critic Gerrit Smith despaired of the deepening partnership between the press and political parties in the 1820s. He cautioned citizens that if they cherished an independent press, then they should “expose it, as little as possible, to the corruption of political parties and to the lying spirit, which too generally actuates them.” Americans did not heed Smith’s warning, however, for unabashedly partisan newspapers came to dominate the press from the 1820s through the Civil War.

So why did Americans tolerate a thoroughly politicized and highly partisan press in the past? In large part it was because the concept of a professional, critical, and objective media was foreign to them. From the 18th through much of the 19th century, the American press was designed to serve a segmented market. Individual newspapers served the interests of merchants, lawyers, women, temperance advocates, abolitionists, churchgoers, devotees of literature, even enthusiasts of pornography, among other niche markets. Americans therefore were used to popular media that promoted and catered to particular points of view, interests and beliefs. In Objectivity and the News, the historian Daniel Schiller contends that the penny press of the 1830s essentially invented the concept of objectivity in the media when they sought to bypass the segmented market and create a broader public appeal. This was an inauspicious development, for these journals’ pose of objectivity was a mere marketing ploy, not an accurate reflection of their editorial or journalistic practice. The penny press still was highly politicized, if not consistently partisan.

Partisan newspapers continued to dominate the press until the late nineteenth century, when. overt partisanship in the media all but disappeared. Politics and the media nevertheless continue to be intimately connected, as the robust market for political news has remained a constant. The proliferation of electronic media in recent years, particularly with the success of special interest websites and blogs, has capitalized on this by resurrecting media partisanship. This might come as an unwelcome shock to those who venerate the myth of media objectivity, but it is unsurprising when considered in the context of the mutual historical development of the media and partisan politics in this country.
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Matthew Isham is Managing Director of The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University. He wrote “A Press That Speaks Its Opinions Frankly and Openly and Fearlessly”: The Contentious Relationship between the Democratic Press and the Party in the Antebellum North in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North.

Salon link
Fox News link

Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, explores the zombie from many different points of view, the contributors look across history and across media. Though they represent various theoretical perspectives, the whole makes a cohesive argument: The zombie has not just evolved within narratives; it has evolved in a way that transforms narrative. This collection announces a new post-zombie, even before the boundaries of this rich and mysterious myth have been completely charted.

We must ask ourselves: Are zombies becoming more human, or are humans becoming more like zombies? If we are, might that resolve some of our uniquely humanist problems? Will the equalizing force of the zombie horde undergo gender trouble, identity politics, and disparities between the haves and the have-nots? Might we not all be better off dead?

Here’s a sneak peek at “And the Dead Shall Rise”.

-Ben Sicker

“Scare Tactics is that rare academic work that’s accessible rather than purposefully opaque, and it has much to offer readers interested in American literature, gothic fiction, or uppity women.”—Bitch Magazine

The notion of “the Gothic” permeates our society’s art forms, conveying the darkest of possible tones. It is this sense of discomfort, this sudden acquaintance with the disturbing and the uncanny, which draws us towards this type of literature time and time again.

Scare Tactics, written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, explores the women authors who contributed to this strangely intriguing literary field. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism.

To read Chapter 1, “The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton”, click here.

For a 20% discount off Scare Tactics, go to www.fordhampress.com. Use Promo Code SCARE at checkout.

Bill talked about his recent book, Vox Populi:The O’Shaughnessy Files, an anthology of his superb radio interviews, essays and editorials.

The Dutch Treat Club is a very influential group of publishers, editors, artists, broadcasters and performers. Recent speakers have included Liz Smith, Jeanine Pirro, Mario Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Wallace.

Read more about Mr. O’Shaughnessy. . .

“Bill O’Shaughnessy’s editorials make his New York TV counterparts look like so much mish mash.”—The New York Times

“A masterful interviewer as well as editorial writer, his interviews of national figures and beguiling local characters are the “…stuff of New York history direct from his radio bully pulpit.”—Liz Smith

There are over 4,000 hand-carved pumpkins that line the walkways, porches, and gardens of Van Cortlandt Manor. Besides the traditional jack-o-lantern faces, there are dinosaurs, insects, a honey hive, pirates, an undersea aquarium, and even a pyramid made of pumpkins. And, of course there are hot apple cider and baked treats to accompany your walk.

This year, the Blaze runs until November 7^th, but if you’re not lucky enough to see the blaze on a clear night and a full moon, here are a few titles that might get you in the Halloween spirit.

Scare Tactics by Jeffrey Weinstock explores the tradition of supernatural writing by American women.

The women of the time repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women and to imagine alternative possibilities.

Paying attention to these overlooked authors—Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford—helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

The staff is also excited about another title rooted in the supernatural—Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie, and Sarah Juliet Lauro.

The authors investigate the zombie from an interdisciplinary perspective, providing the reader with a classic overview of the zombie’s folkloric and cinematic history.

Christie and Lauro seek to provide an archaeology of the zombie—tracing its lineage from Haiti, mapping its various cultural transformations, and suggesting the post-humanist direction in which the zombie is ultimately heading.

Katie Sweeney

Thanks to the effort of librarians, students, teachers, and other reading activists, many of today’s attempts to ban books are largely unsuccessful. However, bringing awareness to these issues is essential, as it inspires us to remember how fortunate we are to have intellectual freedom and responsibility.

Fordham is highlighting several titles on their list which coincide with the mission of Banned Books Week to promote literacy and freedom of speech.

Around the Book: Systems and Literacy is scholar Henry Sussman’s examination of the current state of the printed book. He defends its relevance and importance of books even in the shifting world of Twitter, eReaders, and audiobooks. Sussman delves into history, citing Kafka, Derrida, Blanchot, and others as evidence of the book’s vitality. According to Sussman, the book is still very much the cultural medium–the only obstacle hindering its progress is the blockade to readers’ full expression of literary freedom.(Forthcoming in November 2010).

The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read seeks to dispel the dangerous political association with reading and experience. Rather than promulgate this relationship, Benjamin Bennett refutes it, saying that our literary classics were written with the aim to dispel this notion of “reading” and “the reader.” It’s a radical reassessment of reading and literacy.

The Author-Cat: Clemens’s Life in Fiction takes a look at Mark Twain’s life through his fiction. Author Forrest Robinson insists that though Twain left behind a hefty autobiography, it’s the details he provided in his fiction that tell the real story of his life. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains a controversial book to this day, remaining on frequently challenged and banned books lists.

Go pick up a challenged book and celebrate your right to read it!

Noted humanitarian and activist Dr. Kevin Cahill’s latest, Even in Chaos: Education in Times of Emergency, is a collection of essays written by world leaders and aid workers focusing on the vast importance of education and schools following destruction, natural disasters, war, and other catastrophes. (Now available in both paperback and hardcover)

The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read is literary scholar Benjamin Bennett’s argument against the classical culture of reading. Since reading has long been thought to aid readers in understanding experiences they have not personally had, Bennett questions this association, calling attention to the fact that such an assumption can, in fact, be politically and morally dangerous. It’s an interesting, and not oft explored, side of the literacy issue.

Around the Book: Systems and Literacy is publishing in November, 2010. In it, Henry Sussman examines the past, present, and future of the book as a medium of information in an age of rapidly changing media. Through complex analysis of the nature of the book, Sussman concludes that the book is still a vital part of our culture–read it to learn all of the ways in which books still impact the way we live today.

The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens , publishing in February 2011, is Sarah Winter’s examination of just how Charles Dickens came to lodge himself into the global collective reading culture. She elucidates his methods, spotlighting his publishing process of serialization, his establishment of his authority as an author, and the ways in which his serialized fiction made use of memory and other senses, thus establishing his work as the very foundation of what think of as “reading” and “fiction” today.

Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power

“This well-researched, exhaustive biography reads like a novel, with fleshed-out characters ranging from William Randolph Hearst to JohnGardarino, a penniless newsboy. It is the story of a man, but also of a time, when newsroom scores were sometimes settled with pistols, when anti-Semitism was the norm, when ‘out-of-work politicians became newspaper editors, and successful editors became elected politicians.’ Morris paints a vivid picture, portraying his subject as an ambitious, hotheaded, at times violent, often charitable man; a perfectionist, shrewd in matters of business yet cold in matters of the heart.”—The New York Times Book Review

James McGrath Morris spent five years working on Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power. His previous book, The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism (Fordham University Press), was selected as Washington Post Best Book of the Year for 2004 and was optioned as a film and released as a Random House Audio Book.

To read more about James McGrath Morris Click Here.

INTERVIEW: Fordham Conversations at WFUV (90.7 FM)

Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Women’s Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University, will discuss her latest book Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity (Fordham University Press, 2009) this Saturday at 7am on WFUV (90.7FM).  The book views the iconic actor’s films through a feminist and philosophical point of view. For more information, visit www.wfuv.org .

This here’s a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and it can blow your head clean off. Now, you must ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well do you, punk? -Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry

Tune in this Saturday!