Owen V. Johnson

From Black Politics to Black Community: Harry C. Smith and the Cleveland Gazette

In 1883, at the age of 20, Henry C. Smith founded the Cleveland Gazette. He put his stamp on the newspaper and black public life in the city for more than one-half century. Smith, who served three terms in the Ohio legislature, initially was a strong supporter of the Republican Party and gave his paper a strong political focus. By 1896 politics, although not absent, was off the front page. The Gazette shows how the black press played an increasingly important sociocultural role in the late 19th century as a community builder.

Sharpening of the Blade: Black Consciousness in Kansas, 1892–97

Historians generally link the rapid development of a mobilized nationalcirculation black press following World War I with the growth of a specific black consciousness and identity, a relationship which climaxed in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. This study of a weekly black newspaper in Kansas at the turn of the century suggests that this relationship developed a t the local level several decades earlier, when increasingly restrictive laws instituted after Reconstruction drove blacks westward and northward. The evolution of the Blade in Parsons, Kansas, into a vital part of the black community there was similar to the path followed later by the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other such papers. This study is a qualitative examination of the Blade. Attention is concentrated on two six-week periods, one in 1892, one in 1897, but the research also included an examination of the papers entire life. The first six-week period, September 24-October 29, 1892 (Vol. 1, Nos. 6-1 I), includes the earliest now-existing issues. They were published just prior to national elections. The second six-week period, October 23November 27, 1897 (Vol. 6, Nos. 13-18), includes two issues before and four after

Flag Wars & Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech, by Wingfield, Nancy M.

A visitor to Prague in late 1968 found a monolingual city. Foreigners who did not speak Czech found that people age 40 and above could easily carry on conversations in German. Many Czechs recoiled when they heard German spoken and described Germans as uncultured and loud, but professed a love for German literature. A drive along roads in the mountain areas near the borders of the Czech lands showed run-down communities and abandoned houses. These developments were the result of the processes described and analyzed by Wingfield in this superbly researched book. In nine chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, she traces the development of national and identity questions in Bohemia and Moravia from the late 19 to the mid-20 century, noting their place in the public square and in their close interrelationship with power. In contrast to previous literature, which focuses on this issue from either the Czech side or the German one, she looks at both sides, including the sometimes important interplay between the two, and the way in which Jews were too often left off both sides. In the process, both sides created a usable past, airbrushing out those elements that were inappropriate. Readers of this journal will find particularly interesting the roles of the Habsburg army before 1918, and that of the Czechoslovak Army in the interwar period as they relate to these processes. The author dates the beginning of her story to German liberals’ efforts in the early 1880s to control the public agenda and discourse in an urban world in which class and national identities took on increasing importance. This somewhat intra-German struggle gave way in the following decade to the increasingly violent struggles engendered by the Badeni ordinances that called for the equality of Czech and German in the imperial bureaucracy. She then uses the debate over the possible creation of a second Czech university to examine how conditions in Moravia differed from those in Bohemia. Her final chapter on pre-independence Czechoslovakia focuses on the 60 jubilee of the rule of Emperor Franz Josef in which national concerns eventually overwhelmed the imperial celebration, and the Habsburg

Reporting Students Analyze Selected Newspapers to Raise their Professional Potential

J o u r n a l i s m professionals in recent years have expressed a number of complaints about young college-trained reporters. Among two of the most frequent lamentations are the inability of the young reporters to write literately and their general unfamiliarity with public issues, the latter caused by the lack of regular reading of newspapers and magazines. In a n effort to combat these problems, I instituted a “newsreading” program for two semesters in my reporting classes a t Southern Illinois University. 1 assigned the students the responsibility over the semester to look a t a week’s sampling of eight major newspapers and two issues of different journals of opinion. They filed weekly reports on this reading. Since the semester a t SIU-Carbondale is fifteen weeks long, each student could select which 10 weeks he or she wished to use to complete the individual assignments. I recommended that the project be completed in the first 10 weeks, since the demands of the students’ other courses tend to increase in the latter part of the semester. Students who wished could submit an additional five “reports.” The reports were graded on anacceptable/unacceptable basis. Each failure to submit a report resulted in the subtraction on one point from a semester average (based on 100 points), so there was little tendency to skip these assignments. In addition to expanding their horizons by introducing the students to a variety of quality newspapers, this program suggests three other benefits: